American control conference 2015 tutorial

Abstract

This tutorial provides a radically different perspective to control of switching power electronic systems. It is based on controlling the time evolution of the switching states (i.e., switching sequences) as well as controlling the switching transition of the power semiconductor device of the solid state electronic system. The former - i.e., switchingsequence based control (SBC) yields rapid response under transient condition, optimal equilibrium response, and yields seamless transition between the two states of dynamics. By enabling integration of modulation and control, SBC precludes the need for ad-hoc offline modulation synthesis. In other words, an optimal switching sequence for the power converter is generated dynamically without the need for prior determination of a modulation scheme (which generates a pre-determined switching sequence) in typical conventional approaches. One of the distinctions between SBC and conventional model predictive control (MPC) is that SBC ensure optimal determination of the switching sequence of the power converter under stability bound. The tutorial will provide the mechanism to carry out SBC and MPC control syntheses and demonstrate the differences between SBC and MPC. Several device, converter, and network level implementations (e.g., motor drive, multilevel converter, microgrid, parallel inverters, aircraft power system) of the SBC will be provided. The second part of the tutorial will focus on switching transition control (STC). The primary objective of STC is to demonstrate how key power electronic system parameters including dv/dt and di/dt stress, switching loss, electromagnetic noise emission can be controlled dynamically by modulating the dynamics of the power semiconductor devices. Both electrical and newly developed optical control mechanisms to achieve STC will be demonstrated. In the context of the latter, mechanisms for monolithic integration of switching sequence control as well as switching transition control will be outlined and the revolutionary impact of such a novel integration on system performance will be demonstrated with practical applications.