Switching-Sequence Control of a Higher Order Power-Electronic System Driving a Pulsating Load

In a conventional linear-control design of a higher order power-electronic system (PES), the gains of the control laws are typically determined by small-signal analysis of the averaged model of the PES. The closed-loop control of such a PES (driving a pulsating load that periodically shifts the equilibrium) using its small-signal model is often found to be unsatisfactory with regard to the overall stability and performance. To address the challenges in control design for a PES driving such a nonlinear time-varying pulsating load, this paper delineates an optimal switching-sequence-based control (SBC) scheme, which applies stability-bound switching sequence(s) to the PES. A novel method has been formulated to ensure the reachability of the PES dynamics based on its switching sequence in terms of the time horizon of the switching sequence and the allocation of this time among the switching states of the same switching sequence. This is ascertained by modeling the PES and the pulsating load as a nonlinear map and then using this map and multiple Lyapunov functions determined by solving a set of linear-matrix inequalities corresponding to each of the switching states of a given switching sequence. It has been further shown that the knowledge of the stability bounds of a reachable switching sequence helps in reducing the online computation time for optimal SBC associated with solving the optimization problem by reducing the overall search space. Finally, to validate the optimal SBC, an experimental GaN-FET-based 100-kHz Ćuk-PES has been fabricated and tested on a pulsating load. The overall SBC is implemented on a low-cost TMS320F28335 DSP, which also implements an observer to preclude the need for plurality of sensors for the higher order Ćuk-PES. The overall performance of the SBC is found to be satisfactory under varied dynamical conditions.