Decentralized system controlling the phase connection of a single-phase installation

In this paper, a phase switching system working in a fully decentralized and autonomous way is proposed. Thanks to this device, named the Automatic Phase Switching (APS) system, the phase connection of a single-phase installation will change automatically during normal operation in order to reduce adverse effects of single-phase loads and Decentralized Generators (DGs) in a low-voltage distribution network, such as voltage unbalance, neutral current, voltage deviation, and network losses. The paper presents the APS system architecture with the inside algorithm and the required decentralized measurements. A self-learning tool to estimate the network local sensitivity, which is essential in the connection phase calculation algorithm, is proposed too. Then, simulation results are presented, where the impact of the APS system is evaluated in many scenarios (DG insertion rate, customer load curve, number of APS systems, etc.). In the last part, a prototype of this connection phase control system is associated with a real single phase installation and evaluated through a Power Hardware in The Loop (PHIL) real-time simulation.