Optimal control and implementation of energy management strategy for a DC microgrid

This paper proposes an optimal energy management strategy (EMS) for DC microgrid. The studied system presents a commercial building power system that combines a photovoltaic array (PV), fuel cell (FC), a battery storage system and a bidirectional DC/AC grid converter. The integration of multiple power sources like renewables leads to techno-economical challenges including power quality, stability, fuel consumption, and efficiency. The proposed EMS is based on the salp swarm algorithm (SSA). This algorithm has been implemented because of considerable advantages such as its convergence properties and its reduced computing complexity. The step-by-step design of the proposed method is detailed. Then HIL tests are performed to validate the proposed EMS performances. The performance of the proposed EMS is compared with the state machine control strategy (SMC) in terms of system efficiency and fuel consumption where the obtained results prove the superiority of the proposed EMS (5.2 % fuel saving). Regarding the power quality, the proposed EMS is compared with EMS based PSO to investigate the optimizer influence, the obtained results confirm the ability of the proposed EMS to provide a superior power quality. Hence, the proposed EMS responds to the power systems challenges including power quality, fuel-saving and efficiency.