A two-loop excitation control system for synchronous generators

An excitation controller for a single generator based on modern multi-loop design methodology is presented in this paper. The proposed controller consists of two-loops: a stabilizing (damping injection) loop and a voltage regulating loop. The task of the stabilizing loop is to add damping in the face of voltage oscillations. The voltage regulating loop is basically a PI compensator whose objective is to obtain terminal voltage regulation about the prescribed reference. The main contribution of this paper is to give some insights into the systematic derivation of multi-loop controllers of power generators. Certain connections between the two-loop excitation controller and standard PSS-AVR schemes are discussed. In this way, some insight into the stability of the standard PSS scheme is obtained from the analysis of the proposed controller. The proposed controller is evaluated via numerical simulations on a full finite-element model.