An Adaptive Active Damper for Improving the Stability of Grid-Connected Inverters Under Weak Grid

When a grid-connected inverter is connected to a weak grid, the system may be unstable. An active damper can be connected to the point of common coupling (PCC), which simulates a virtual resistor to dampen the resonance and thus stabilize the system. In this paper, an adaptive tuning method of the virtual resistor is proposed, which can automatically regulate the virtual resistor to the critical value to stabilize the system, and thus reduce the power loss. Furthermore, the active damper is designed not to respond to the dominant low-frequency harmonic components in the PCC voltage introduced by the grid background harmonics, so that its power loss can be further reduced. In order to make the active damper more accurately simulate the virtual resistor in a wide frequency range, a harmonic-current-reference compensation method is proposed. The prototypes of a 6-kW grid-connected inverter and a 1-kVA active damper are built and tested to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme of the active damper.