S06 - Advanced Power-Electronics Control for Practicing Engineers

This tutorial provides a fundamentally different perspective to multi-scale control of switching power electronic systems along with plurality of practical experimental results and is expected to be of great interest to the power electronic system engineers, professionals, educators, and students. Many new materials are planned for this tutorial with several recent developments. The tutorial will start with basics for engineers, professionals, researchers, and students and gradually working its way through to intricacies in advanced control concepts, realizations, and practical implementations for advance control realizations on new topologies and control platforms.

The first part of the tutorial will primarily focus on switching sequence-based control for power electronics systems. By enabling integration of modulation and control, switching sequence-based control 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 any modulation scheme (which generates a pre-determined switching sequence) in typical conventional approaches.

The tutorial will provide the mechanism to carry out switching sequence-based control and model predictive control syntheses and demonstrate the differences between the two optimal control schemes. Several device, converter, and network level implementations (e.g., microinverter, solar inverter, pulsed-power systems, microgrid, parallel inverters, multilevel converter, aircraft power system) of the switching sequence-based control will be provided encompassing author’s multiple years of project experience encompassing leading advanced defense and energy industries.

Finally, the tutorial will focus on switching transition control. The primary objective of this control is to demonstrate how key power electronic system parameters including dv/dt and di/dt stress, switching loss, and 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 switching transition control will be demonstrated.

This tutorial is intended for a wide spectrum of researchers, industry professional, educators, and students reflecting the typical distribution of APEC 2024 audience. The tutorial will start with basics of modern controls outlined above, leading up to the elucidation of the novel mechanisms, followed by multiple applications to show the utility of the advanced controls and how practicing engineers and researchers can benefit of them.