Accurate Estimation of Core Losses for PFC Inductors

abstract: As the world becomes more electronic, power electronics designers have continuously designed more efficient converters. However, with the rising number of nonlinear loads (i.e. electronics) attached to the grid, power quality concerns, and emerging legislation, converters that intake alternating current (AC) and output direct current (DC) known as rectifiers are increasingly implementing power factor correction (PFC) by controlling the input current. For a properly designed PFC-stage inductor, the major design goals include exceeding minimum inductance, remaining below the saturation flux density, high power density, and high efficiency. In meeting these goals, loss calculation is critical in evaluating designs. This input current from PFC circuitry leads to a DC bias through the filter inductor that makes accurate core loss estimation exceedingly difficult as most modern loss estimation techniques neglect the effects of a DC bias. This thesis explores prior loss estimation and design methods, investigates finite element analysis (FEA) design tools, and builds a magnetics test bed setup to empirically determine a magnetic core’s loss under any electrical excitation. In the end, the magnetics test bed hardware results are compared and future work needed to improve the test bed is outlined.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Electrical Engineering 201

A Virtual Environment for Remote Testing of Complex Systems

Complex systems, realized by integration of several components or subsystems, pose specific problems to simulation environments. It is, in fact, desirable to simulate the complex system altogether, and not component by component, since the operation of the single part depends on the surrounding system and an early verification can prevent damages and save time for modifications. The availability of detailed and validated models of the single parts is therefore critical. This task may be difficult to achieve. In fact, in industrial applications, where a system can be a mix of different devices produced by different manufacturers, the physical device may not be accessible to the modeler for proprietary or safety concerns. Starting from this point, the idea of creating a virtual environment able to test the real single component remotely, employing simulators with remote signal processing capability, has been considered. In this paper a methodology for remote model validation is presented. The effectiveness of the approach is experimentally verified locally and remotely. For the remote testing, in particular, the physical device under test is located at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and the Virtual Test Bed model is located at the University of South Carolina

On mixed abstraction, languages and simulation approach to refinement with SystemC AMS

Executable specifications and simulations arecornerstone to system design flows. Complex mixed signalembedded systems can be specified with SystemC AMSwhich supports abstraction and extensible models of computation. The language contains semantics for moduleconnections and synchronization required in analog anddigital interaction. Through the synchronization layer, user defined models of computation, solvers and simulators can be unified in the SystemC AMS simulator for achieving low level abstraction and model refinement. These improvements assist in amplifying model aspects and their contribution to the overall system behavior. This work presents cosimulating refined models with timed data flow paradigm of SystemC AMS. The methodology uses Cbased interaction between simulators. An RTL model ofdata encryption standard is demonstrated as an example.The methodology is flexible and can be applied in earlydesign decision trade off, architecture experimentation and particularly for model refinement and critical behavior analysis

Rapid Prototyping of Digital Controls for Power Electronics

The process for designing digital controls for power electronics is typically quite convoluted and affords many opportunities for errors to occur. We present here a new and complete, method for rapid prototyping of digital controls that allows rapid realization of new designs. The approach uses a collection of tools that include both software (the virtual test bed (VTB) and Matlab/Simulink) and hardware (dSpace DSP). An example application of the methodology completes the discussion

Transient electrothermal simulation of power semiconductor devices

In this paper, a new thermal model based on the Fourier series solution of heat conduction equation has been introduced in detail. 1-D and 2-D Fourier series thermal models have been programmed in MATLAB/Simulink. Compared with the traditional finite-difference thermal model and equivalent RC thermal network, the new thermal model can provide high simulation speed with high accuracy, which has been proved to be more favorable in dynamic thermal characterization on power semiconductor switches. The complete electrothermal simulation models of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) and power diodes under inductive load switching condition have been successfully implemented in MATLAB/Simulink. The experimental results on IGBT and power diodes with clamped inductive load switching tests have verified the new electrothermal simulation model. The advantage of Fourier series thermal model over widely used equivalent RC thermal network in dynamic thermal characterization has also been validated by the measured junction temperature

Laboratory implementations of PMSM drive in hybrid electric vehicles applications

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are one of the today\u27s most successful technologies for developing systems that require real time operation and providing additional flexibility to the designer. This research is focused on developing a control board for a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) using an FPGA module. The board is configured for individual use of an FPGA, digital signal processor (DSP) or in combination to control the PMSM by generating the required Pulse Width Modulator (PWM) to the inverter in order to drive and control the speed of the PMSM. Since, the exact rotor position and speed are required to control the motor; a useful method is developed digitally and implemented in the FPGA hardware module. The speed observer (SO), in which the Hall effect signals were used to calculate the speed and the angle of the rotor. In this thesis, three different techniques of PWM generation were developed and combined with rotor position and speed method. The project is implemented in Altera FPGA using Quartus II software V11.0 with VHDL as the supporting language. The design achieved high performance and accuracy of the detection estimation and control scheme for the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine. Error and design analysis has been done also --Abstract, page iii

Modeling Power Consumption and Temperature in TLM Models

International audienceMany techniques and tools exist to estimate the power consumption and the temperature map of a chip. These tools help the hardware designers develop power efficient chips in the presence of temperature constraints. For this task, the application can be ignored or at least abstracted by some high level scenarios; at this stage, the actual embedded software is generally not available yet. However, after the hardware is defined, the embedded software can still have a significant influence on the power consumption; i.e., two implementations of the same application can consume more or less power. Moreover, the actual software powe

Comparative Study of Power Semiconductor Devices in a Multilevel Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter

This thesis compares the performance of a nine-level transformerless cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter with integrated battery energy storage system (BESS) using SiC power MOSFETs and Si IGBTs. Two crucial performance drivers for inverter applications are power loss and efficiency. Both of these are investigated in this thesis. Power devices with similar voltage and current ratings are used in the same inverter topology, and the performance of each device is analyzed with respect to switching frequency and operating temperature. The loss measurements and characteristics within the inverter are discussed. The Saber® simulation software was used for the comparisons. The power MOSFET and IGBT modeling tools in Saber® were extensively utilized to create the models of the power devices used in the simulations. The inverter system is also analyzed using Saber-Simulink cosimulation method to feed control signals from Simulink into Saber. The results in this investigation show better performances using a SiC MOSFET-based grid-connected BESS inverter with a better return of investment

Motion Control with FPGA

The aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the field programmable gate array (FPGA)‐based digital control system design for motion control. It is intended as a reference for the undergraduate students in science and engineering, professionals, and enthusiastic people who have a basic knowledge in discrete control theory and digital systems using reconfigurable logic. The scope of this chapter includes the analysis, simulation, and implementation of classic control algorithms. The presented topics serve as a foundation for the implementation of more complex systems. An experimental section is provided, which validates the proposed digital design