Title: A heuristic approach to robust control design for boost power converters with harmonic reduction

Authors: S.K. Patnaik, B. Umamaheswari

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai 600 025, India. ' Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai 600 025, India

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to the design of an output voltage regulator for a boost converter operating in continuous conduction mode. This approach relies on |robust control| design techniques, but uses some heuristic rules for defining the controller design procedure instead of being based on a precise definition of model uncertainties. Design algorithms of H_∞ robust controllers are cast in a |black-box| framework, leaving some free design parameters to be tuned by the user. The resulting controller attenuates input–output transmission (low audio-susceptibility), has decentralised structure and uses only local information, guaranteeing stability and the desired closed-loop dynamic response. The main contribution of the tuning rules is that the controller parameters can be obtained using one design parameter which reflects the trade-off between stability robustness and time domain performance. Various aspects of the design, including the associated practical problems and the proposed solutions, are detailed. Simulation results on a boost converter, using a poorly regulated voltage source, are presented to assess the performance of our approach.

Keywords: boost converters; continuous conduction model; small signal analysis; Riccati equation; H_∞ controllers; harmonic reduction; robust control; controller design; output voltage regulators; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAAC.2008.022895

International Journal of Automation and Control, 2008 Vol.2 No.4, pp.436 - 446

Published online: 02 Feb 2009 *

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