Droop control design to minimize losses in DC microgrid for more electric aircraft

Droop control has been widely used as a load-sharing method between paralleled power sources in DC microgrid due to its modularity and reliability. Existing droop gains design methods rely on computationally intensive supervisory control algorithms and knowledge of sub-system parameters.This paper presents a streamlined design approach for optimal droop gains, relying only on the knowledge of the parameters of the local converter power losses model in order to achieve minimum power losses for a More Electric Aircraft (MEA) DC microgrid. Additionally, a simplified, but sufficiently accurate, converter losses model is proposed in this paper for optimal droop gains design. The proposed converter losses model consists of two parts; no-load losses, and losses which are represented by Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR). The proposed design approach analyses show that setting the optimal droop gains equal to the converter ESR will achieve minimum overall DC microgrid power losses without the need for any additional information on the DC transmission line parameters. The effectiveness of the optimal droop gains design method is tested in a simulation environment and evaluated experimentally using a laboratory DC microgrid test rig.