IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17) 1

CAN based grid synchronisation technique of a

micro grid with Renewable source
Haripriya M1 and Vasanthanayaki C2
1
PG Scholar, 2Associate Professor
1
[email protected],2 [email protected]
1,2
Department of Electronics and Communication
Government College of Technology,Coimbatore

Abstract— The objective of this project is to minimise the sun light to produce steam which in turns runs a turbine to
transients in the power system when a renewable energy source is produce electricity.
synchronised with electrical power grid. In the growing demand Solar Photo Voltaic systems are operated in two
of electrical power, alternate resources such as renewable source modes such as on grid and off grid.
are inevitable. Renewable source power plants such as solar
power plants (microgrid) (Photovoltaic cells) operate in both off
grid and on grid modes. Grid Synchronisation (GS) is a A. Grid synchronisation
necessary operation to connect the renewable source to the micro
When a SPV system is to be operated in on grid mode. it
grid. Communication between the controllers on both the side
using Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol is proposed in has to be sychronised with the grid. Grid synchronisation is
this project. CAN protocol is chosen over Ethernet and GPS the process of matching the parameters such as voltage
assisted GS since Ethernet has transmission delays and GPS amplitude, frequency, phase sequence and phase angle of SPV
assisted GS is costlier. CAN is an efficient and low cost protocol system with the gird. To avoid damages caused by the
which helps in reducing the synchronisation time. Whenever the transients during switching, it is necessary to have low
renewable source has to connected to the grid, the required transient switching. Renewable resources are dynamic in
information is shared among the main and local controllers via nature and the input energy from them are constantly
CAN. The voltage templates from the grid are obtained and changing. This makes the grid synchronisatin even more
transmitted through CAN to the local controller. To match the
difficult. Proper grid synchronisation is required to avoid
parameters such as voltage amplitude and frequency, a Voltage
Source Inverter is used which is connected with the local damage to the power systems. The following have to be
controller. Whenever there is switching to on-grid mode, VSI considered before designing a grid sychronisation scheme:
produces the required controlled output. A DC-AC converter
circuit is added to get an AC output from the PV cells. The x Noisy grid voltage
proposed technique thus provides faster and transient less x balancing the grid voltages
transition between modes. x changes in frequency and voltage
Keywords- Grid Synchronisation, Controller Area Network,
microgrid, renewable energy sources, transients, synchronisation
x Phase angle variations due to voltage sags
time x Voltage swells

I. INTRODUCTION If the GS does not consider the above conditions, the

In the growing demand of electrical power, alternate switch may be thrown at the wrong time. So there must be a
resources are inevitable. Another reason for the need of highly reliable grid synchronisation technique assisted with a
alternate energy resources is the depletion of fossil fuels which communication system to avoid such conditions. In
supply about of the world energy consumers. The energy Microgrids communication based GS is preferred for faster
resources may be renewable or non-renewable. Renewable networks. There are several communication protocols such as
energy is naturally replenished, abundant and non- polluting as Network Time Protocol (NTP) [9], GPS assisted
well. Energy obtained from solar, wind, earth, tides are communication, power line communication that can be
termed as the renewable energy. Alternate non- renewable implemented to assist the GS technique. NTP works poorly
energy resources are limited and also polluting. Nuclear since it has transmission delay which increases the
energy is a good example. Hence researches are going on synchronisation time.
renewable energy resources for future pollution free energy On the other hand, GPS is expensive which increases the
production. Solar power and wind energy are major two system cost and Power Line Communication (PLC) [5] has
promising renewable resources to meet the future energy controlling issues due to its bandwidth. Hence Controller Area
demand. Solar power is used directly and indirectly to produce Network (CAN) based GS can be implemented since it is
electrical power. Direct method incorporates Photo Voltaic performance and cost efficient.
effect, which converts sun light into current using
semiconductor devices. in indirect method, the heat from the

978-1-5090- 5778-8/17/$31.00©2017 IEEE

Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology

 IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17) 2

B. Photovoltaic system Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the grid connected
PV systems can be divided into two types namely PV system. The major blocks are explained as follows:
x Stand alone system
x Grid connected system A. PV system
Stand alone systems are used for industries or for small A photovoltaic system, also solar PV power system, or PV
villages and grid connected sytems are to supply the main system, is a power system designed to supply usable solar
grid. power by means of photovoltaic. It consists of an arrangement
of several components, including solar panels to absorb and
C. Grid Synchronising Techniques convert sunlight into electricity, a solar inverter to change the
There are several synchronising techniques such as Zero electric current from DC to AC and a Power Conditioning
Crossing Detection, Phase Locked Loop and Synchronous Unit (PCU).
Reference Frame (SRF) PLL. ZCD has poor performance A PCU is an electronic unit which consists of
when there is distortions in the grid. PLL is less complex since x Inverter
it is open looped but it has no frequency tracking tracking.
Also it has steady state error issues. SRF PLL is preferred x DC-DC Converter
since it has good frequency tracking and voltage disturbance x Control Algorithm
rejection.

1) Synchronous Reference Frame (SRF) PLL 1) Inverters

Using Park’s transformation, stationary (αβ) are Voltage Source Inverter is implemented in the
transformed into synchronous reference frame dq. (αβ) frame proposed system. with the available data from the PLL circuit,
will be obtained from the three phase voltages. The angular the VSI output is controlled to be matched with the main grid.
position of the dq frame is controlled by a feedback loop.
2) DC-DC Converter
A boost converter is a DC-to-DC power converter that
D. Difficulties in GS steps up voltage and stepping down current from its input
There are several issues in operating the microgrid in supply to its output load.
different modes. In islanded mode of operation it undergo Implementing an MPPT algorithm can increase the
problems such as black start, instability, power balancing, efficiency of the system by consuming maximum power
etc.,. When there is a grid failure, the microgrid should possible from the PV panels.
provide the local loads with uninterrupted power. Microgrid is
connected to the grid mainly to meet the load demand. So 3) Control algorithm
when there is peak power demand the microgrid should supply From the grid controller the voltage and current
the grid with power to balance the loads’ power requirements. information is sent to the microgrid controller over CAN. The
when the restors rom a failure, the microgrid must be control algorithm is implemented in the system using PI
connected to the grid. During these switchings, the timing of controllers in the proposed system. With the help of SRF-PLL
closing the switch is very critical and have to be taken care of. circuit, gate pules are generated corresponding with the grid
voltage. Thus the desired output which is matched with the
grid voltage is obtained.
II. IMPLEMENTATION
III. CAN IMPLEMENTATION
Each controller is considered as a node in the CAN
PV system
with PCU
MG
controller
CAN
transceiver
protocol. Any node can access permission to be the master to
transmit or receive messages. The voltage template, status of
the switch is transmitted from the grid controller over the
CAN to the microgrid controller. The microgrid controller
CAN BUS passes the acquired to the SRF-PLL circuit. This circuit will
Gr
Local id generate the information to set the microsource voltage , phase
load angle and frequency corresponding to the main grid. The
CAN microgrid controller checks the information at intervals to
tr Grid
controller make sure the micrgrid parameters matches with the main
s1
grid. The communication flow among the controllers is shown
in the flowchart. The whole system is modeled in
MATAB/SIMULINK and the simulated results are obtained.

Fig. 1 Block diagram of the proposed PV system

Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology

 IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17) 3

A. Flowchart IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

The proposed CAN based GS technique is
implemented in MATLAB/SIMULINK software. The model
Initiate the system auxiliaries and links
is created from the device modules present in the Simulink
library. The grid voltage, current and power (synchronised)
waveforms are obtained from the scope of the model. From
the waveforms, the synchronisation time can be obtained.

Grid controller acquires the

grid voltages and the Switch
status

Send the aquired data of grid voltages and switch

status on CAN

Fig. 3 Waveform of grid voltage

Microgrid receives grid voltages and switch
status, generates the Sine template using SRF- Figure 3 shows the PV voltage and the grid voltage
PLL after synchronisation. It can be inferred from the waveform
that the PV output voltage is matched with the grid voltage.
The transients prevail for a short period of time and then the
output becomes stable.

Microgrid controller sets the vtg, ref. as per the

received amplitude of the grid vtg. and current ref.
zero

MG controller sends the request to Grid controller

to close the switch for grid connectivity

sts
Fig. 4 Waveform of grid current
clos
ed?
n
o y
e

MG switch over to grid connected mode. MG

controller controls the set point of MS

Fig. 2 Communication flow in the proposed scheme

Fig. 5Waveform of inverter input voltage and current

Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology

 IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17) 4

REFERENCES
[1] Sushil S. Thale and Vivek Agarwal, “Controller Area Network
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Fig. 6 Waveform of PV array output
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Table 1 gives the output voltage at VSI and grid in the 580–585.
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Modules Input Output Frequency Conf. Exhibit. ICT Energy Symp., Florence, Italy, Sep. 2012, pp.
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Thus transients were reduced by using a reliable GS 1–8.
in the proposed sytem. The synchronization time was reduced
by using communicaton based GS technique. Converter with
an efficient MPPT algorithm can increase the power efficiency
of the system. By implementing SRF-PLL with adaptive RLS
filter can reduce the harmonics and noises in the output of
VSI. So future works can be done by implementing such
MPPT algorithms and adaptive RLS filters to improve the grid
synchronization of a PV system with the utility grid.

Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology