Distributed Secondary Control Based on Bi-Limit Homogeneity for AC Microgrids Subjected to Non-Uniform Delays and Actuator Saturations

Frequency and voltage are the most significant indicators in AC microgrids (MGs). To maintain the stability of grid frequency and bus voltage, this paper proposes a distributed secondary control scheme based on bi-limit homogeneity for frequency restoration, average voltage recovery, active and reactive power sharing among DGs in AC MGs subjected to non-uniform communication delays and actuator saturations. First, a state-transformation-based strategy by virtue of the past information of the control input is designed to deal with non-uniform delays, which can fully alleviate the adverse effects of communication delays. Additionally, the hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to approximate the non-smooth saturation function and to design anti-saturation fixed-time controller, which can mitigate the impact caused by actuator saturations. Then, by constructing an auxiliary bi-limit homogeneous system, the fixed-time stability of the close-loop control system with the constraint of actuator saturation can be demonstrated. Finally, several simulation cases are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy on a test MG system, and the results are compared with other existing methods. Simulation and comparison results reveal the proposed method's validity, robustness and flexibility in restoring the MG's frequency/average bus voltage and achieving accurate active/reactive power sharing.