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• The proposed control strategy ensures an accurate power sharing while providing the "plug and play" function in both islanded and grid connected operating modes. • It ensures a seamless transition from islanded to grid connected modes of mesh microgrids without affecting the DGs' active and reactive power sharing during the synchronization phase. • In grid-connected mode, the proposed control allows the exchange of active power between the microgrid and the main grid without affecting the DGs active and reactive power sharing. • In both operating modes of mesh microgrids, the control is robust with respect to large load variations and microgrid topology changes. • The proposed control is robust with respect to high communication delays and can be used in practice. In this paper, a novel distributed nonlinear control strategy of mesh microgrids' distributed generators (DGs) based on droop control approaches is proposed. It ensures secure synchronization of DGs and their accurate active and reactive power sharing in both islanded and grid-connected operating modes of mesh microgrids. This control method allows also a seamless transition from islanded to grid-connected modes without affecting the DGs' active and reactive power sharing during synchronization as well as controlling independently the exchanged active and reactive powers with the main grid. The efficiency of the proposed control strategies is verified first by Simulink/Simscape simulation results and then validated by experimentations using Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) real time simulator of opal-rt and dSPACE platforms. The control robustness is also investigated with respect to the load variation, the microgrid topology modification and the communication time delays. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigated the power sharing issues in mesh islanded microgrids that contain several distributed generators (DGs) and loads connected to different points of common coupling (PCC). Firstly, an improved decentralized droop control algorithm is proposed to achieve the active and reactive power sharing of different DGs in reconfigurable mesh islanded microgrids. Accurate power sharing was obtained even though line parameters or the mesh microgrid configuration were unknown. Secondly a state-space model of the whole mesh microgrid was developed, considering several generators with their decentralized controllers, line feeders, and dynamic loads. This model was used to design parameters of droop controllers, to study the asymptotic stability and the robustness properties of the system. All strategies and analyses were validated by simulation based on the generic microgrid detailed in the standard IEEE 9bus test feeder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]