Identification of Frequency Ranges for Subharmonic Oscillations in a Relay Feedback System

This paper examines the behaviour of a single loop relay feedback system (RFS) which is driven by an external signal. It is well known that such a RFS exhibits a variety of oscillation patterns including forced and subharmonic oscillations (SO). This paper focuses on the conditions for SO. It will be shown that for an external signal with a fixed amplitude, it is possible for SO with different orders to occur simply by changing the frequency of the external signal. Similarly, for an external signal with a fixed frequency, it is possible for SO with different orders to occur when the amplitude of the external signal is varied. The conditions under which these different scenarios will occur are explored. An analysis of these conditions identifies the frequency ranges where certain orders of SO are possible for a given amplitude of the external signal. The effects of the initial conditions on the SO are illustrated and discussed. Simulation studies are presented to illustrate the result

Power-quality improvement of a stand-alone induction generator using a STATCOM with battery energy storage system

This paper presents a STATCOM with a self-oscillating bidirectional dc-dc converter for interfacing battery energy storage in a stand-alone induction generator system. The self-oscillation mode is based on relay feedback control with hysteresis. To reduce the output current ripple, an LCL filter is connected between the half bridge of this dc-dc converter and the energy storage system. The other side of bidirectional converter is coupled with a voltage-source converter. The proposed control allows that the previous electronic converters, with an additional resistive dump load, compensate all disturbances in a self-excited induction generator due to three-phase four-wire loads and an improvement of system efficiency. The simulated results show good performance of the stand-alone power system under different loading conditions.Postprint (published version

Global analysis of piecewise linear systems using impact maps and surface Lyapunov functions

This paper presents an entirely new constructive global analysis methodology for a class of hybrid systems known as piecewise linear systems (PLS). This methodology infers global properties of PLS solely by studying the behavior at switching surfaces associated with PLS. The main idea is to analyze impact maps, i.e., maps from one switching surface to the next switching surface. Such maps are known to be "unfriendly" maps in the sense that they are highly nonlinear, multivalued, and not continuous. We found, however, that an impact map induced by an linear time-invariant flow between two switching surfaces can be represented as a linear transformation analytically parametrized by a scalar function of the state. This representation of impact maps allows the search for surface Lyapunov functions (SuLF) to be done by simply solving a semidefinite program, allowing global asymptotic stability, robustness, and performance of limit cycles and equilibrium points of PLS to be efficiently checked. This new analysis methodology has been applied to relay feedback, on/off and saturation systems, where it has shown to be very successful in globally analyzing a large number of examples. In fact, it is still an open problem whether there exists an example with a globally stable limit cycle or equilibrium point that cannot be successfully analyzed with this new methodology. Examples analyzed include systems of relative degree larger than one and of high dimension, for which no other analysis methodology could be applied. This success in globally analyzing certain classes of PLS has shown the power of this new methodology, and suggests its potential toward the analysis of larger and more complex PLS

Heat flow dynamics in thermal systems described by diffusive representation

The objective of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of heat flow in thermal structures working under constant temperature operation. This analysis is made using the tools of sliding mode controllers. The theory is developed considering that the thermal system can be described using diffusive representation. The experimental corroboration has been made with a prototype of a wind sensor for Mars atmosphere being controlled by a thermal sigma-delta modulator. This sensor structure allows to analyze experimentally the time-varying case since changes in wind conditions imply changes in the corresponding thermal models. The diffusive symbols of the experimental structures have been obtained from openloop measurements in which pseudo-random binary sequences of heat are injected in the sensor. With the proposed approach it is possible to predict heat flux transient waveforms in systems described by any arbitrary number of poles. This allows for the first time the analysis of lumped and distributed systems without any limitation on the number of poles describing it.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft