Integrated power systems are popular in the shipbuilding industry. DC shipboard microgrids (dc-SMGs) have many advantages compared with ac ones in terms of system efficiency, operation flexibility, component size, and fault protection performance. Being in the exploring stage, dc-SMGs have several potential configurations with different system architectures and voltage levels. In a dc-SMG, functional blocks integrated include power generation modules (PGMs), propulsion system, high power loads, and pulsed loads specifically in naval ships. In modern ships, the PGMs include not only generators and fuel cells but also energy storage systems (ESSs), which cooperate with generators to improve the overall efficiency and reliability. High power electric converters are vital interfaces between the functional blocks and the dc distribution system. Rectifiers for generators take the tasks of dc bus voltage regulation and power sharing. Inverters for propulsion motors are responsible for the motor drive in different operating conditions. Bidirectional dc/dc converters for ESSs are used to provide supply-demand balance and voltage fluctuation mitigation. This article makes a comprehensive review of power architecture, functional blocks including electrical machines and energy storage, as well as power converters in dc shipboard power systems.

This article presents a review of coordinated control strategies, stability analysis, and fault management for dc shipboard microgrids (dc-SMGs). As an emerging application, the dc-SMG lacks a comprehensive summary of the control schemes. Considering the specific load profile in ships, this article discusses the coordinated control strategies of diesel generators and energy storage system. Depending on the maritime conditions, different operation modes are switched by the energy management system. Due to the presence of high-bandwidth controlled constant power load converters, negative impedance instability is induced. Meanwhile, the pulsed loads in dc-SMG may affect the voltage stability significantly. Small-signal and large-signal stability analysis can be used to evaluate the effect of these two types of loads. In the aspect of the shipboard protection system, this article presents the specific requirements of dc-SMG based on the standards. Lacking “ground” in ships, solutions in designing the grounding system for dc-SMG is described. Besides, the short-circuit fault management consisting of fault detection, fault isolation, and reconfiguration in dc-SMGs are summarized. Finally, the existing commercial dc ships are presented and compared to demonstrate the developing trends.

In DC microgrids, constant power loads (CPLs) reduce the effective damping of the DC-DC converter and may induce destabilizing effects into the DC-DC converter. To overcome such problems regarding CPL and ensure large-signal stability of DC-DC converters in DC microgrids, some feedforward terms are added to $V$ - $I$ droop-based dual-loop controller for a DC-DC converter based on the large-signal model. It is proven that the feedforward terms can not only improve the transient response but also guarantee the exponential stability of the closed-loop system in the whole operating range in regards to a large-signal manner, which is verified by using a singular perturbation model. Moreover, a disturbance observer is designed to estimate the output current, thereby enabling the removal of the current measurement sensor. The proposed technique can be easily plugged into a pre-defined $V$ - $I$ droop-based dual-loop controller without an additional sensor being required. Ultimately, both simulation and experimental tests verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, an overload and short-circuit protection method is proposed for voltage source inverter-based uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system. In order to achieve high reliability and availability of the UPS, short circuit and overload protection scheme are necessary. When overload or short circuit happens, using the proposed control method, the amplitude of the output current can be limited to a constant value, which can be set by the customer to avoid the destruction of the power converter, and to obtain a faster recovery performance as well. The detailed principle of the proposed protection method is discussed in this paper. It mainly contains three parts in the control diagram for current limit, first is the anti-windup in the voltage and current controllers, then the feedforward of the capacitor voltage to the current control loop, the last is the fast reset of the resonant part of the current controller when overcurrent happens. The procedure of developing the control method is also presented in the paper. Experimental results on a commercial UPS system are presented to verify the effectiveness of the control method.

In this paper, an average active power sharing control strategy based on the distributed concept for the parallel operation of voltage source inverters is proposed to be applied to the modular uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. The presented method is named distributed adaptive virtual impedance control (DAVIC), which is coordinated with the droop control method. Low bandwidth CAN-based communication is used for the requirement of data sharing of the proposed method in the real modular UPS system. Unlike the conventional virtual impedance control techniques, the virtual impedance of a converter module is adjusted automatically by using global information when DAVIC is applied, further to tune the output impedance of the power modules. The adaptive virtual impedance is calculated by using the difference between the active power of a local module and the average active power of all the modules in a modular UPS. The DAVIC overcomes the drawback of the conventional virtual impedance control since an accurate value of the real output impedances of different converter modules is not required. Simulations using PLECS and experiments on a real commercial modular UPS are developed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control methodology. These results shown a superior power sharing performance is obtained when using the proposed method.

This paper presents a distributed average integral secondary control (DAISC) method for modular uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems-based microgrids. For each UPS unit, the local primary control level encompasses droop control and virtual impedance loops, which is commonly used in parallel inverter systems. In order to provide a fast voltage recovery performance, along with excellent power sharing capability among the parallel UPS modules, a distributed secondary control method based on controller area network (CAN) communication is proposed. In a sharp contrast to the existing distributed secondary control strategies, in which the output voltage and frequency of the modules are not shared through the CAN bus, in the proposed approach, the inverter modules of the modular UPS share the integral output value of the secondary controller. By using the proposed novel DAISC approach, a better dynamic power sharing performance along with an inherent anti-windup capability of the integral controller is achieved. Simulation results using PLECS and experiments from a modular UPS platform have been developed to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed distributed secondary control. The results show that good performance of voltage recovery and power sharing of the proposed control method is obtained.