Simulation Assessment of the Impact of Pulsed Loads in DC Shipboard Microgrid

As one of the vital load types in the military shipboard power system (SPS), the pulsed load normally features with the transient high power. Thus, in the case that the SPS has a small inertia constant, the operation of pulsed loads may heavily affects the voltage stability. Benefiting from various advantages of the DC microgrid in terms of the flexibility of power source connection, generator efficiency, and fuel consumption, the DC SPS is recognized as the next-generation solution. In order to assess the impact of pulsed loads in the future DC SPS, a comprehensive time-domain simulation study in Matlab/Simulink software has been conducted in this paper, where pulsed loads with two types of profiles, namely, single-pulse signal and multiple-pulses signal, have been included in the evaluation. Especially, the effect of pulse signal parameters, including the peak power, the pulse duration, the pulse interval time, and the pulse number has been simultaneously tested and analyzed. The DC bus voltage drop during the pulsed load operation has been taken as the index in the simulation. Key findings in the study have been summarized in detail, which leads to the final conclusions.