Enhancing the performance of a deregulated nonlinear integrated power system utilizing a redox flow battery with a self-tuning fractional-order fuzzy controller

Abstract

Load frequency regulation is one of the most vital and complex ancillary services in a deregulated power system. Increasing penetration from renewable energy sources in an integrated power system (IPS) further escalates the related control complexity due to a considerable decrement in IPS’s effective inertia. This may incur additional costs and can even lead to the destabilization of IPS. To overcome these problems in frequency regulation, this work proposes and investigates the use of an intelligent, direct adaptive control scheme, i.e., self-tuning fractional order fuzzy PID (STFOFPID) controller with and without the presence of a recently devised energy storage unit, i.e., the redox flow battery. The IPS’ efficacy with the STFOFPID controller is validated for various contracts in a deregulated operation mode for considered three area IPS. Extensive simulation studies are carried out, and detailed comparative studies have been drawn with conventional PID and fractional order PID controllers for load frequency regulation in Poolco, bilateral, and contract-violation mode of operation. Robustness analysis in terms of parametric variations in different nonlinearities present in a reheated thermal power plant is also carried out, and the efficacy of the STFOFPID controller is established using a thorough quantitative comparative analysis. The real-time digital simulation validation of the investigated control structure has been carried out on OPAL-RT 4150 based on Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA board with INTEL multi-core processor.