Mathematical Model and Digital Control of a Twin Power Converter

In spite of latest remarkable technological achievements reached in electronic devices and converters development, faults in power electronics remains unavoidable. Even using modern gate-driven power devices that ensure high performance electronic commutation, the reliability criteria represent major design paradigm for developers. In a vast majority of applications, the hardware redundancy represents one of the best solutions to achieve high level fault-tolerance in power electronics. Starting from the above remarks, this paper presents a specially conceived converter for servomotors that operate in a twin hardware topology to reach high reliability and fault-free operation. In a first step, the specific mathematical model of the converter is presented that considers several faulty states which may occur during its functioning cycle. This model has been tested then through computer simulations. To experiment with the power converter operation in real conditions, a digital control system has been interfaced suitable to generate various operation regimes and conditions. The heart of this digital control system is BigPIC6 embedded development board that represents a versatile microcontroller-based platform suitable for a wide range of control and automation applications. By using this hardware topology, specially developed software has been implemented to experiment with the twin power converter operation under various test conditions. These tests prove the proper operation of the entire test platform and confirm the viability of the twin power converter topology for high reliability applications. Such solutions are mostly preferred in industrial environments where faults or damages are not avoided.