An Improved Active Damping Method for Enhancing Robustness of LCL-Type, Grid-Tied Inverters under Weak Grid Conditions

The conventional proportional-gain-feedback link can only obtain the smallest effective damping region (EDR) due to the control delay among all the active damping methods regarding the capacitor current feedback. The digitally controlled system tends to be unstable when the system resonant frequency reaches the critical frequency caused by the grid impedance variation. To weaken the adverse effect on the system caused by the control delay, phase-lead feedback links are applied along the feedback path to provide phase compensation. By taking the simplicity and reliability of the feedback links into account, this paper proposes an alternative to an ideal differentiator, which consists of the Tustin discrete form of ‘s’ and a digital low-pass filter. This proposed method has an identical phase frequency characteristic as an ideal differentiator but a better magnitude frequency characteristic, and its EDR can reach [0, f(s)/3]. The system stability analysis is conducted under different resonant frequencies, and under the condition of a weak grid, the co-design approach of the active damper and digital controller is presented. Finally, the experimental results are shown to verify the proposed method.