Contributions to the analysis and design of intelligent microgrids with renewable energies

Keywords: Smart Microgrids, Bidirectional Converters, Digital Control, Energy management, Smart Grid

Even though electrical power networks have a long history their development in the last decade was accelerated. A new trend in this field is the development towards power systems with distributed generation (DG), also known as “Smart Microgrids”. Their integration in the national power grids experienced significant developments nowadays worldwide. The general intention is to build microgrids with distributed generation close to the end users thus minimizing the power losses for energy transportation. This thesis discusses aspects related to the design and development of intelligent microgrids with renewable energies. For the development of this kind of systems models are used for the proper sizing of their components.

The individual objectives of the thesis are:

• Model development which helps the economic design of the microgrid and development of models for the electrical behavior of each converter of the microgrid;
• Communication protocols study to see which is best suited to be implemented in the microgrid;
• Comparative analysis of bidirectional DC-DC converters which can be used in microgrids;
• Aspects related to the control of the various converters used in microgrids;
• Analysis of two topologies for the MPPT converter which can be used in tracking the maximum power point of the solar panels;
• The design of a bidirectional converter with current doubler rectifier for the energy management of the storage devices;