Simulink-Based FPGA Control for EMI Investigations of Power Electronic Systems

Control schemes applying sinusoidal pulsewidth (sPWM) have been widely employed in power conversion solutions. With the development of the future smart grid, more capabilities of the converters are required introducing additional electromagnetic interference (EMI) control measures. In this article, a MATLAB controllable sPWM generator has been developed to optimize electromagnetic compatibility. The field-programmable gate array running at 100 MHz is capable of producing simultaneous and synchronous control signals for 16 power electronic switches. Six flexible control parameters have been implemented, which allow the controller to be tuned to a large number of applications and investigate several EMI mitigation techniques and investigate the disturbance dependence on operational parameters. As an example, the detrimental dead time effect is shown, with a variation in emissions of 10-20 dB in the frequency range of 50 kHz to 50 MHz. Highest experimentally tested switching frequencies have been recorded at 2 MHz with resulting sinusoidal waveforms from 50 Hz to 250 kHz.