In-depth study of direct power control strategies for power converters

Direct power control (DPC) has received a significant amount of research attention because of its benefits such as simplicity, robustness and excellent dynamic response. In the last few years DPC has been widely used in power electronics and electric drives. Recently, because of the rapid increase in the penetration of distributed generation sources connected to the local AC and/or DC common buses through power electronic converters, further development of DPC strategies is highly required. In addition, given the fact that the requirements of the system performance vary in different applications, it is very useful to provide an in-depth analysis so as to select the suitable control approach. This study presents an investigation of DPC of power converters. The theoretical principles are analysed and studied. The performance of each control method is then validated by experimental tests on a laboratory power converter system. The evaluated characteristics include the power ripple, line current total harmonic distortion (THD), switching behaviour, control complexity, etc. The reported results provide engineers and researchers on the subject with valuable insights into the features and implementation constraints of the DPC strategies in power and energy systems.