Voltage-balancing of two controllers for a DC-DC converter-based DC microgrid with experimental verification.

Imbalances are one of the major challenges encountered during DC microgrid operation. This study presents a DC-voltage-balancing strategy that uses a high-performance controller. Indirect-sliding-mode (ISM) control is used in the current control loop and voltage loop to achieve fast dynamics, and a conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller with optimized parameters is designed. The performances of the nonlinear and linear controllers are compared and verified through a simulation performed using MATLAB/Simulink, along with an experimental analysis. The voltage-balancing dynamics of the two controllers are also compared. These results demonstrate that the ISM scheme can achieve better DC voltage balancing performance in the transient regime than the conventional PI scheme for the DC-DC converter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]