Investigation of Communication Delay Impact on DC Microgrids with Adaptive Droop Control

This work aims to investigate the effects of communication delay in a DC microgrid, which operates under an adaptive droop control scheme. A case study of a residential DC microgrid is examined, which is essentially a household prosumer with power generation units, both on site and remotely, energy storage units and various loads. Conventional droop control schemes have been widely adopted in DC microgrids, although they cause voltage deviation, due to the different characteristics of generation units, whereas their performance is sensitive to line impedances. In order to compensate this deviation, while maintaining current sharing accuracy (adapting to line impedances), a distributed secondary controller is considered, which regards only the information of neighboring converters, by the aid of digital communication links. The impact of various communication methods, in terms of communication delay is examined and evaluated via MATLAB/Simulink simulations.