Electric Spring with Improvised Control for Voltage
Regulation and Power Factor Improvement
Journal:
GRENZE International Journal of Engineering and Technology
Authors:
K. Zehra Shamsuddin, Renu George
Volume:
3
Issue:
2Special Issue
Grenze ID:
01.GIJET.3.2Special Issue
Pages:
139-148
Abstract
The Electric Spring is a promising new technology that has immense potential to
stabilize future power grids that have a large number of renewable energy sources
connected to them. Based on Hooke's law for mechanical springs (hence the name ‘Electric
Spring’) it is a versatile reactive power controller that not only helps in regulating the grid
voltage by controlling real and reactive power flow but also stores electric energy and
damps out electric oscillations. The unique aspect of the Electric Spring that differentiates it
from ordinary reactive power controllers is that it adopts an “input feedback - input voltage
control” as compared to the “output feedback - output voltage control” in traditional RPCs.
This subtle change in control strategy helps in making loads connected to the grid adaptive
to the availability of intermittent renewable power generation, thus achieving effective
demand-side management capabilities. In this paper an improvised control scheme for the
Electric Spring based on the synchronous frame control method for single phase full-bridge
inverters is presented. With the help of MATLAB simulations it is proved that this method
can provide fast dynamic voltage regulation and power quality improvement for the grid.