Distributed event-triggered control of DC microgrids with output saturation constraint

To achieve both voltage restoration and proportional power sharing, we propose a novel distributed event-triggered secondary control for islanded DC microgrids that is subject to output saturation. Unlike the time-triggered control, the event-triggered control only updates its control input when the trigger condition is met, instead of updating the control signal periodically. As a result, the number of controllers’ updates and the burden of computation will be significantly reduced. Output saturation is an unavoidable limitation in almost every physical system which determines that sensor measurements cannot measure any arbitrary value. Thus, the present paper investigates how to achieve consensus of event-triggered control in the presence of output saturation constraint compared with the case where there is no output saturation. The proposed controller achieves voltage restoration and power sharing, whereas by using output saturation, the number of data transmissions among distributed generators reduces. Our proposed event-triggered condition is analyzed by Lyapunov synthesis to make sure it is stable and Zeno-free. As a final step, the proposed controller’s effectiveness is evaluated using the MATLAB/SimPowerSystems toolbox for an islanded DC microgrid. •A distributed event-triggered control of DC microgrids with output saturation is proposed.•We analyze impacts of output saturation on communication links and local controllers.•The controller conserves communication resources by reducing the number of transmissions of sampled data.•The proposed event-triggered condition is simpler and faster in convergent response.•The stability of proposed strategy is guaranteed by Lyapunov theory while avoiding Zeno behavior.