Review on Advanced Control Technologies for Bidirectional DC/DC Converters in DC Microgrids

DC microgrids encounter the challenges of constant power loads (CPLs) and pulsed power loads (PPLs), which impose the requirements of fast dynamics, large stability margin, high robustness that cannot be easily addressed by conventional linear control methods. This necessitates the implementation of advanced control technologies in order to significantly improve the robustness, dynamic performance, stability and flexibility of the system. This article presents an overview of advanced control technologies for bidirectional dc/dc converters in dc microgrids. First, the stability issue caused by CPLs and the power balance issue caused by PPLs are discussed, which motivate the utilization of advanced control technologies for addressing these issues. Next, typical advanced control technologies including model predictive control, backstepping control, sliding-mode control, passivity-based control, disturbance estimation techniques, intelligent control, and nonlinear modeling approaches are reviewed. Then the applications of advanced control technologies in bidirectional dc/dc converters are presented for the stabilization of CPLs and accommodation of PPLs. Finally, advanced control techniques are explored in other high-gain nonisolated (e.g., interleaved, multilevel, cascaded) and isolated converters (e.g., dual active bridge) for high-power applications.