Consideration of Control-Loop Interaction in Transient Stability of Grid-Following Inverters using Bandwidth Separation Method

Abstract

Grid-following inverters have been widely adopted as a grid interface for renewable energy, and ensuring their small-signal and large-signal stability is critical to modern power systems. Their large-signal, or transient, stability is a significant challenge to analyze because of the interaction of the phase-locked loop (PLL), which must maintain synchronism with various outer-loop controllers. Simple analysis in which outer-loop controllers are idealized is insufficient, and the interactions between the nonlinear dynamics of the PLL and the dynamics of the DC-link voltage control (DVC), as well as the AC terminal voltage control (TVC) when present, must be considered. An asymptotic analysis approach, termed the bandwidth separation method, is proposed. This method enables simplification and order reduction of the original differential equations when sufficient bandwidth separation exists. Through this method, the interaction between the DVC and PLL is explicitly characterized, revealing that such interaction degrades system stability and shrinks the stability region. The analysis also indicates that voltage instability, rather than PLL loss of synchronization alone, is often the root cause of transient instability. Optimal bandwidth configurations for the PLL and DVC are identified under various grid fault conditions: a larger PLL bandwidth improves resilience to phase-jump faults, while a larger DVC bandwidth enhances tolerance to power fluctuations. In addition, the influence of the TVC loop is analyzed, showing that a high TVC bandwidth can mitigate the destabilizing effects of PLL-DVC interaction and further improve transient stability. All analytical findings are validated through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments.