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The interleave boost converter (IBC) has been used as the interface converter between the low-voltage electrical energy sources, such as lithium-ion battery banks, solar panels, and fuel cells, and the dc bus of dc microgrids. With increasing penetration of tightly regulated power electronic loads, which behave as constant power loads, the stability of microgrid dc-bus voltage that is fed by the IBC is threatened by the loads’ negative incremental impedance feature. To ensure the stability of the bus voltage, this article proposes a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO)-based sliding-mode control algorithm. The proposed algorithm has excellent robustness, low computational burden, and no extra hardware cost. A generalized average state-space model is proposed to facilitate the control design. In addition, an NDO is employed to estimate the output power of IBC rapidly and accurately. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, simulation and experimental results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different from single-bus dc microgrids (MGs), a multibus MG normally bridge multiple dc buses via a complex line impedance network. This intricate configuration together with tickling constant power loads may cause severe stability issues. For system stability improvement, conventional ways include designing small-signal stabilizers in a decentralized way and constructing large-signal stabilizers by solving Lyapunov equation in a central controller. Note that centralized methods may be vulnerable to single point of failures, while decentralized patterns are commended to reinforce MG reliability and scalability. To implement large-signal stabilization in decentralized mechanisms, which has rarely been investigated in the existing literature, a novel uniform nonsmooth control scheme (UNCS) is proposed, in this article. UNCS has the following fourfold advantages. First, UNCS helps to express commonly used dc/dc converters, boost, buck, and buck–boost, into a uniform model. The model substantially facilitates a uniform stabilizer design that accommodates the preceding three converters despite their differences in topology. Second, UNCS assigns each converter based distributed generator (DG) with a composite large-signal stabilizer comprising a nonsmooth observer and a nonsmooth controller. The controller neutralizes the disturbances estimated by the observer, and it also rigorously stabilizes the internal states in DG uniform model. Third, the stabilizer also provides an additional control degree of freedom, a finetuning factor, to refine DG dynamic responses to meet high requirements for voltage and power qualities. Fourth, when numerous DGs with the proposed stabilizer congregate to build a multibus MG, the overall system large-signal stabilization is autonomously attained without communication links, which is mathematically justified by Lyapunov stability analyses. As such, DGs are allowed to randomly plug in/out without worrying about impairing system level stability. Simulations help to properly select relevant key parameters. Experiments show that UNCS outperforms the standardly designed PI controls, and it will stabilize the multibus MG in a large operation range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]