High-Accuracy Inertia and Damping Estimation Method and Testing Equipment for Grid-Forming Converters

Grid-forming converters (GFMCs) receive increasing adoption in modern power systems due to their salient advantages, such as grid formulation and improved stability in weak grids. In GFMCs, inertia and damping play an essential role on the frequency regulation of modern grids. As such, the accurate estimation of these parameters is of great value for ensuring system stability, advancing ancillary service markets, and supporting grid-forming standardization. However, existing estimation methods rarely target at GFMCs' inertia and damping, rely on large amounts of data, and lack validations through experiments. In view of this, this article proposes a simple and effective model-based testing method that exploits the inherent relationship between frequency and power. By decoupling inertial power and damping power, the estimation accuracy is greatly improved. Building on this method, we further developed the first grid-forming testing equipment. As verified by experiments, inertia and damping coefficients estimation errors are within 5% and 2%, respectively.