Stationary-Frame Grid-Forming Inverter Control Architectures for Unbalanced Fault-Current Limiting

Grid-forming (GFM) control offers promising performance features for inverter-based resources (IBRs) across scales. However, design, analysis, and benchmarking of GFM IBRs during unbalanced faults remains largely unexplored. In this article, we outline a stationary-reference-frame nested-loop control architecture for GFM IBRs and integrate the same with novel current-limiting strategies. The architecture improves on virtual-impedance and current-reference-saturation limiting as well as state-of-the-art methods for control of voltage-source inverters. Electromagnetic-transient simulations for a modified IEEE 14-bus network validate salient features of the proposed control architectures. The proposed virtual-impedance limiter is shown to provide better voltage support during faults than the current-reference-saturation limiter (quantified via sequence voltages). On the other hand, the current-reference-saturation limiter offers better (and more accurate) fault-current contribution.