An experimental comparison of several nonlinear controllers for power converters

In this paper we present an experimental comparative study of five controllers for boost DC-to-DC converters reported in the control literature. For all these algorithms local asymptotic stability of the desired equilibrium is insured. To carry out the experiments we constructed a low cost electronic card, which captures the essential features of a commercial product. The algorithms are compared with respect to ease of implementation, in particular their sensitivity to the tuning parameters, and closed-loop performance. The latter is evaluated with the standard criteria of steady state and transient behaviour to steps and sinusoidal references, and attenuation of disturbances in the power supply and sensitivity to unknown loads. Motivated by the experimental evidence we propose several modifications to the basic schemes, for some of them we establish some new theoretical results.