Hybrid Energy Management System for Microgrid
Applications
Imran Sheikh
Center of Excellence in Complex and
Non-linear Dynamical Systems
VJTI, Mumbai-400019
Email: imran.sheikh.vjti@gmail.com
Abstract The paper presents the application of DSP
processor for energy management system (EMS) of non-
renewable energy and renewable energy sources intended for
grid connected applications. The hybrid supplies like wind
power, solar power, fuel cell is the clean energy source with zero
emission of hazardous gas. It is used in the portable power
generation, stationary power generation and power for
transportation. The storage devices like battery or ultra-
capacitor is connected parallel to store the energy and to improve
the transient response. The combination of hybrid energy and
storage devices are considered for better charging and
discharging with better life time of the battery and ultra-
capacitor. The presented scheme explain the generation of pulse
width modulation (PWM) gated pulse signals using the
TMS320F28335 DSP digital signal controller with
MATLAB/Simulink and Code composer studio (CCS). The plant
for hybrid energy and storage devices based energy generation is
intended for grid connected applications implemented in the
dSPACE 1104 R&D Controller board for real time simulation
and output of the system.
Keywords Code composer studio (CCS), Digital Signal
Processor (DSP), Energy management system (EMS), Fuel Cell
(FC), Pulse width modulation (PWM), Photovoltaic (PV), Ultra-
Capacitor(UC).
I. INTRODUCTION
The use of the non-renewable energy sources such as fossil
fuel has increased drastically from past few years. It has
carbon as the main element which has a great impact on
environmental life [10]. When coal is burnt to produce power,
it mixes with oxygen producing the carbon dioxide as
byproduct. Carbon dioxide is the gas responsible for the global
warming. The alternate power source for the generation of
electricity is fuel cell, wind power, solar power. The hybrid
energy sources have great advantage compared to
conventional power sources and it can eliminate the pollution
caused by burning the fossil fuel [2]. The wind turbine
converts the mechanical energy into electrical energy. The PV
converts solar energy into electrical energy. The fuel cell is
978-1-4673-9925-8/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE
device that generates electricity by a chemical reaction with
hydrogen and oxygen leaving behind water as byproduct. With
all this advantages it has some limitation due to its slow
transient response which affects current delivered from it [2].
Therefore the hybrid energy sources need to be combined with
other power sources like ultra-capacitor, DC power supply.
This hybrid combination provides better response [2]. The
hybrid combination of different electricity network for
generating electricity with better system stability used to fulfill
the energy need of specific location [7]. There are various
renewable energy sources available, some examples are wind
power, photovoltaic, fuel cells, fuel cells are better option
compare to wind power and photovoltaic but need of the
continuous supply of hydrogen gas is required . The wind
power generation requires huge lands and large size of
turbines but when combines with fuel cells and photovoltaic, it
becomes good power source for the village. The fuel cell
based power generation needs less space and it may be
continuous power source if there is uninterrupted supply of
hydrogen [1].
There is several paper work presented on this literature
about control strategy for microcontroller implementation. In
[3] DSP controller used is DS-1104 dSPACE which is costly
and bulky compared to TMS320F28335. The TMS320F28335
is compact low cost floating point controller and simple in use.
The research in [5] for PWM pulse generation uses DSP-
FPGA National Instrument CompactRio. The installation
space requires for DSP-FPGA quite large on small size
electrical appliances and cost is also high, which is not
efficient for low cost and compact devices. Compared to the
others work in [4] which uses real time microcontroller with
FPGA need more time to integrate and complicate to use.
The main contribution of this paper is implementation of
the algorithm that generates the PWM gated pulse for power
electronics converters. For this generation of PWM pulse, the
DSP controller is considered. In todays technology there are
lots of DSP processors are available but the most recent and
the better than the other is TMS320F28335. It is very efficient
tools for the real time application and designing various
361
control technology for mobiles, power supplies, medical, voltage output of hybrid energy sources were regulated by
industrial controls, home theatres. The previous version of boost converter and bi-directional converters regulate the
DSP board TMS320F2812 for this application has lots of storage system. The reference current for generating error
drawbacks and it cannot support floating point calculation. signal from proportional integral was produced using
The application of this TMS320F2812 is explained in [1]. The interconnection damping assignment passivity based control
motivation of this paper is to implement the control algorithms (IDA-PBC) [2][11][13]. To overcome several difficulties
using the delfino family DSP platform digital signal controller. associated with hybrid sources, the association of some DC
It has the flash memory 256K x 16 which for more than supply or ultra-capacitor is needed. The general working block
TMS320F2812. It has the maximum speed of 150MHz. There diagram of system is shown in fig.1. The fig.1 shows hybrid
are the numbers of ways to write the algorithm in DSP
combination of hybrid energy sources with the storage system
controller, some of these are:
to avoid slow response. The DSP processor is implemented
1) Writing the source code using the code composer studio in
with proportional integral (PI) to generate error signal that can
C language.
2) Implementing MATLAB/Simulink models using the control duty cycle of the PWM control pulse. In [12] IDA-
embedded coder with help of code composer studio and PBC based control strategy was introduced. In which there are
control suite [20]. an inner control loop for hybrid sources based proportional
Writing the control algorithm in MATLAB/Simulink is integral controller mange current of the storage devices based
easy compared to the general C language code writing in the proportional integral controller and outer loop to control DC
Code composer studio [16]. The complete development PWM bus voltage and charge remaining in the storage system.
pulse generation and data acquisition with sampling and
processing is presented.
The DSP- Based application rapid prototyping is easy with
the algorithm written in C language. It can be easily reused
and it provides better flexibility in changing the frequency of
PWM pulse [16][17]. There are lots of applications available
for DSP based control system for power electronics converters
and designs [18][19].
The structure of paper is as follow. In Section II, brief
review architecture of energy management system (EMS) and
algorithm is discussed. In section III, complete description of
DSP peripherals and the implementation of algorithm for
PWM pulse generation is discussed, and in section IV
experimental observation and results discussed. The last
section V concludes paper with final remarks.

II. ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

The main objective of this paper is to present DSP-based
energy management system and development. The hybrid
energy sources are connected parallel with auxiliary power
unit for storage and to improve transient and system stability
to achieve dedicated control system [9]. The dedicated control
system is designed with help of the DSP processor
TMS320F28335 and uninterruptible power supply is designed.
This hybrid combination of power supplies provides better
static and dynamic response of the system. The hybrid energy
sources combination with energy storage system improves the
quality of the power fed into the microgrid [8]. The fuel cells
are electrochemical device that can convert chemical energy
of hydrogen into electrical energy with high efficiency and
low environmental impact [10]. The fuel cell alone offers slow
dynamic response and that degrade current regulation in the
microgrid. The current regulation is important for increasing
time span of energy storage devices. The hybrid design that is
proposed in this paper comprises of the one boost converter
and one bi-directional buck boost converter. The current and
Fig. 1. The proposed system implemented in dSPACE DS1104
and control system in DSP processor.
Control parameter of the hybrid system controls outer loop
and inner loop. The current and the voltages from the hybrid
energy sources are managed by inner loop and bus voltage
requirement is fulfilled by outer loop. The buck-boost
converter is used for switching and charging-discharging of
storage system like ultra-capacitor and battery. The charging
of the UC/battery takes place in buck mode and discharging of
the UC/battery takes place in boost mode. The switching of
this converter is done with PWM pulse [2]. The PWM control
pulse is generated from acquired analog signals from the
system with analog to digital converter. The analog and digital

362
converters acquire analog signal from the system and sample
it. The processing of the sample signal is done in DSP
processor to generate requires duty cycle for the PWM pulse.
The bi-directional buck-boost converter has two switches to
maintain the DC bus voltage. The MATLAB/Simulink model
of the hybrid power supply is implemented in the dSPACE
DS1104. The analog signal is taken from the dSPACE
DS1104 and given to control system in DSP processor. The
dSPACE DS1104 is device that can generate the real time
output from MATLAB/Simulnk models [24]. The simplified
diagram of this system is shown in fig.2. The fig.2 shows the
analog signals from implemented system in dSPACE DS1104
and the PWM control pulse from DSP processor. The
parameter of PWM pulse can be changed in real time while
system is running with help code composer studio [23]. The
PWM switching frequency has to be more than frequency that
affect the load [14].
Fig. 2. Energy Management System.
The energy management of system is done to increase the
efficient use of power available from sources. The efficiency
of the system increases [15].
III. DSP PERIPHERALS AND CONTROL SIGNAL
The DSP processor is optimized for streaming signal
processing and applications. It is mainly designed for high
speed and complicated system implementation. The DSP used
for PWM firing pulse is TMS320F28335 equipped with
several peripherals such as 16-channels 12 bit pipelined ADC
configurable as two independent 8-channel modules to service
the ePWM. It has random access memory (RAM) of 68 KB
and flash of 512 KB. For PWM firing pulse generation it has
18 channels with 88 general purpose input output registers
[22]. The DSP processor hardwires the basic function of many
signal processing algorithms and this optimizes transistor use
and clock cycles for the required operations.
A) Embedded Coder for Code Generation
The embedded coder is code generation package available
in the MATLAB/Simulink. It can generate the readable,
compact and fast C/C++ language code for use on embedded
processor, on target prototyping boards. The support package
for same can be downloaded from Mathworks support
center[20]. The generated code by embedded coder is
developed in the block of MATLAB/Simulink and is defined
by the target language compiler script in ert.tlc [20]. The
complete generation procedure is shown in fig.3. The
embedded coder generates code that may be complicated in
problem with synchronization between sensed signals from
sensor and generation of firing pulse. The support package for
MATLAB/Simulink embedded coder is available at [21].
B) Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
The IDE used for separate code writing without code
generation is code composer studio (CCS). This CCS provides
the integrated platform for design, implementation, simulation
and verification on target board for real time application.
There are several of versions of the IDE developed by the
Texas Instrument [23]. It includes compiler, assembler, linkers
and automatic code built procedure for development boards.
The complete flow of the procedure is shown in fig.4.
Fig. 3. The procedure for code generation from embedded
coder.
C) DSP TMS320F28335 Peripherals for PWM Generation
The generation of PWM pulse requires analog input from
outside of board. It senses both analog current and analog
voltage signals. The ADC module can sense analog input from
0 to maximum 3 Volt.
This analog voltage is converted to digital equivalent value
by the given formula.
363
Where ADCLO is the ADC lowest operating voltage. That is
ideally zero.
From the above formula it is observed that ADC give
digital output from 0 to 4096 for its analog input voltage from
0 to maximum 3 volt. There are three type of counting mode
available for PWM generation and each can be selected from
the program setting.
1) Count Up mode
2) Count Down mode
3) Count Up and Down mode
The count up mode is used for inverter and count down
mode is used for chopper [22]. The dead time problem is
available in PWM generation that can be avoided using some
dead band in program for PWM generation. During dead time
both the transistor on and large amount of current flow
through transistor making them short circuited. The fig.5
shows the complementary PWM pulse.
Fig.4. Code composer working procedure for C language
programming.
The fig.4. Explain the CCS project development for C
language programming and applications [23].
The transistor gate turn on faster than they turn off. The
both transistor turn on for short duration of time called dead
time.The dead time can be eliminated by adding some dead
band in the program [19].
Fig. 5.Complemented PWM pulse for gate switching.
IV. RESULTS AND EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATIONS
To verify the working of the proposed system, a laboratory
setup is prepared and checked by varying the analog input to
the control system from 0 to 3 Volt. The corresponding analog
input to DSP processor generate the PWM pulse with different
duty cycle is shown in fig.6. The switching pulse for boost
converter is shown in fig.6 (a), (b), (c) with different duty
cycles. The switching pulse for the bi-directional converter is
shown in fig.6 (d).
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 6. Represents (a) PWM pulse with 40% duty cycles. (b)
PWM pulse with 50% duty cycles. (c) PWM pulse with 75%
duty cycles. (d) PWM pulse for switching bi-directional buck-
boost converters.
The energy management system is implemented using the
real time environment dSPACE DS1104 and low cost DSP
processor interfaced with the MATLAB/Simulink embedded
coder. The fig.6 shows the generated control signal for the
buck, buck-boost converter to track the DC bus voltage and
maintain the system performance as required. The
experimental setup for the energy management system is
364
shown in the fig.7 that describes the connection of dSPACE
DS1104 with DSP processor.
Fig.7 Experimental setup.
V. CONCLUSION
The generation of PWM control signal is presented with
MATLAB/Simulink and code composer studio. The DSP
based application for energy management system verifies the
performance satisfactorily by varying analog signal and
observing the change in duty cycle . It is concluded that result
obtained from above procedure is better than the previous
work of others. The experimental result shows effectiveness of
system and the functionality of algorithm. The use of
MATLAB/Simulink and CCS for DSP processor is presented.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We acknowledge the support of TEQIP-II through center of
excellence (COE) in Complex and Nonlinear Dynamical
System (CNDS), VJTI, Mumbai.
REFERENCES
[1] Kirubakaran, K.; Jain, Shailendra; Nema, R.K., "DSP-Controlled Power
Electronic Interface for Fuel-Cell-Based Distributed Generation,"
in Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.26, no.12, pp.3853-
3864, Dec. 2011.
[2] Mane, S.; Kazi, F.; Singh, N.M., "Fuel cell and ultra-capacitor based
hybrid energy control using IDA-PBC methodology," in Industrial
Instrumentation and Control (ICIC), 2015 International Conference on ,
vol., no., pp.879-884, 28-30 May 2015.
[3] Belvedere, B.; Bianchi, M.; Borghetti, A.; De Pascale, A.; Di Silvestro,
M.; Paolone, M., "DSP-Controlled Test Set-up for the Performance
Assessment of an Autonomous Power Unit Equipped with a PEM Fuel
Cell," in Clean Electrical Power, 2007. ICCEP '07. International
Conference on , vol., no., pp.468-473, 21-23 May 2007.
[4] Belvedere, B.; Bianchi, M.; Borghetti, A.; Nucci, C.A.; Paolone, M.;
Peretto, A., "A Microcontroller-Based Power Management System for
Standalone Microgrids With Hybrid Power Supply," in Sustainable
Energy, IEEE Transactions on , vol.3, no.3, pp.422-431, July 2012.
[5] Belvedere, B.; Bianchi, M.; Borghetti, A.; Paolone, M., "A
microcontroller-based automatic scheduling system for residential
microgrids," in PowerTech, 2009 IEEE Bucharest , vol., no., pp.1-6,
June 28 2009-July 2 2009.
[6] Kirubakaran, A.; Jain, Shailendra; Nema, R.K., "DSP controlled DC/DC
boost converter for renewable/green power applications," in Power
Electronics, Drives and Energy Systems (PEDES) & 2010 Power India,
2010 Joint International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1-6, 20-23 Dec.
2010.
[7] N. Jenkins, R. Allan, P. Crossley, D. Kirschen, and G. Strbac, Embedded
Generation. London, U.K.: IEE, 2000.
[8] Jain, S.; Agarwal, V., "An Integrated Hybrid Power Supply for
Distributed Generation Applications Fed by Nonconventional Energy
Sources," in Energy Conversion, IEEE Transactions on , vol.23, no.2,
pp.622-631, June 2008.
[9] Wei Jiang; Fahimi, B., "Active Current Sharing and Source Management
in Fuel CellBattery Hybrid Power System," in Industrial Electronics,
IEEE Transactions on , vol.57, no.2, pp.752-761, Feb. 2010.
[10] US Department of Energy, Fuel Cell Handbook (7th edition), EG&G
Services Parsons, Inc., 2004.
[11] Amin; Bambang, R.T.; Rohman, A.S.; Dronkers, C.J.; Ortega, R.;
Sasongko, A., "Energy Management of Fuel Cell/Battery/Supercapacitor
Hybrid Power Sources Using Model Predictive Control," in Industrial
Informatics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.10, no.4, pp.1992-2002, Nov.
2014.
[12] Hilairet, M.; Bethoux, O.; Azib, T.; Talj, R., "Interconnection and
damping assignment passivity-based control of a fuel cell system,"
in Industrial Electronics (ISIE), 2010 IEEE International Symposium
on , vol., no., pp.219-224, 4-7 July 2010.
[13] Becherif, M.; Ayad, M.Y.; Miraoui, A., "Modeling and Passivity-Based
Control of Hybrid Sources: Fuel Cell and Supercapacitors," in Industry
Applications Conference, 2006. 41st IAS Annual Meeting. Conference
Record of the 2006 IEEE , vol.3, no., pp.1134-1139, 8-12 Oct. 2006.
[14] Pop, O.; Chindris, G.; Dulf, A., "Using DSP technology for true sine
PWM generators for power inverters," in Electronics Technology:
Meeting the Challenges of Electronics Technology Progress, 2004. 27th
International Spring Seminar on , vol.1, no., pp.141-146 vol.1, 13-16
May 2004.
[15] Weimin Li; Guoqing Xu; Hang Tong; Yangsheng Xu, "Design of
Vehicle Control Unit Based on DSP for a Parallel HEV," in Automation
and Logistics, 2007 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no.,
pp.1597-1601, 18-21 Aug. 2007.
[16] Hercog, D.; Curkovic, M.; Jezernik, K., "DSP based rapid control
prototyping systems for engineering education and research,"
in Computer Aided Control System Design, 2006 IEEE International
Conference on Control Applications, 2006 IEEE International
Symposium on Intelligent Control, 2006 IEEE , vol., no., pp.2292-2297,
4-6 Oct. 2006.
[17] Lesan, A.Y.E.; Doumbia, M.L.; Sicard, P., "DSP-based sinusoidal PWM
signal generation algorithm for three phase inverters," in Electrical
Power & Energy Conference (EPEC), 2009 IEEE , vol., no., pp.1-6, 22-
23 Oct. 2009.
[18] Niasar, A.H.; Moghbeli, H.; Vahedi, A., "Implementation of Four-
Switch Brushless DC Motor Drive based on TMS320LF2407 DSP,"
in Signal Processing and Communications, 2007. ICSPC 2007. IEEE
International Conference on , vol., no., pp.332-335, 24-27 Nov. 2007.
[19] N.Mohan, T.M. Undeland, and W.P. Robbins, Power Electronics
Converters, Applications and Design, 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Jon Wiley &
Sons, 2001.
[20] Mathworks Embedded Coders, (Jan 2015). [Online]. Available:
http://in.mathworks.com/products/embedded-coder/
[21] Mathworks TI C2000 Support from Embedded Coders, (Jan 2015).
[Online]. Available: http://in.mathworks.com/hardware-support/ti-
c2000.html
[22] Texas Instruments Inc. TMS320281x DSP Analog-to-Digital
Converter(ADC) Reference Guide Houston, TX: Texas Instruments Inc.,
2007.
[23] Texas Instruments, Code Composer Studio TM IDE. Houston, TX: Texas
Instruments Inc., 2009. Available: http://www.ti.com.
[24] Nicanor Quijano, Kevin Passino, Santhosh Jogi, A Tutorial Introduction
to Control Systems Development and Implementation with dSPACE,
Dept. of Electrical Engineering, The Ohio State University, 2002.
365