Sensitivity Based Reduction of Equivalent Electrical Circuits in Power Electronics Application

This paper presents an application of an equivalent electric circuit reduction technique to improve the runtime of transient simulations. The approach is based on efficient adjoint sensitivity analyses of the initial electric circuit. Focus is in particular on electric circuits that contain a manageable number of functional elements, potentially of a non-linear type like semiconductor switches, and a much larger number of linear elements that are manifestation of "parasitic effects" as a result of the actual layout and design of the device. The reduction will retain the interpretability of the circuit elements whereas the complexity of the equivalent electric circuit is dramatically reduced. This has the beneficial side effect of stabilizing the transient simulation.The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated in the conducted emissions simulation of a prototypical inverter. The accuracy of the model is good enough to predict the conducted emissions up to 30 MHz.