Date of Award

Spring 2019

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Andrea Benigni

Abstract

In the last ten years, DC microgrid approaches have gained more popularity for the interconnection of distributed energy resources (DERs) and prosumers. The devices (generation, storage, and load) connected to the network may contain operational parameters that have the ability to be adjusted in real-time as to optimize the operation of the microgrid. In this thesis, a simple unidirectional global communication scheme is defined, implemented, and tested. The proposed approach relies on low frequency sinusoidal components that are injected into the DC microgrid power lines. Using the proposed communication approach, multiple parameters can be transmitted to the devices connected to the microgrid. For implementation of the proposed method, no dedicated hardware is needed; it only requires software modification of the converters interfacing to the microgrid. Therefore, this method can be considered a convenient and effective means for low-level communication on a DC microgrid. This thesis outlines the methods to implement this communication while providing an example detection scheme demonstrated in an emulation environment.

Rights

© 2019, Matthew Davidson

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