Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2003.

In power electronics, the switched converter plays a fundamental role in the efficient conversion and dynamical control of electrical energy. Due to the switching operation of these systems, overlaid disturbances come into existence in addition to the desired behavior of the variables, causing deviations in the current and voltages. From a control perspective, these disturbances are of no interest since they cannot be compensated. They can even alter the measurements given to the control system, affecting its behavior. Furthermore, during the control design, averaged models are often used, by which the switching operation is somehow disregarded. They consider instead the average behavior of the system variables. Thus, it is essential that the measuring setup provides a measurement of the average value to the control system. To accomplish this goal, there are in practice different approaches. For example, the disturbances originated by the switching operation can be either suppressed using an analog or digital filter, or the sampling of the variables can be carried out in a suitable manner, synchronous to the carrier of the modulation method. Unfortunately, the use of filters adds an extra phase shift or delay to the control loop, reducing its dynamical performance. Moreover, the synchronous sampling method provides a good approximation of the average value only if certain conditions are met, otherwise a distortion due to aliasing takes place. A method is developed in this work to predict, in every switching cycle, the average value of the system variables in a switched power converter. In this context, the work presents an alternative method to carry out the measurement of the average value, avoiding the principal drawbacks of the standard measuring methods. To achieve this, a suitable model of the converter is used, incorporating the modulation method and the type of analog-to-digital converter, either a conventional sample-and-hold or a sigma-delta converter. The measurement given by the analog-to-digital converter is used to predict the time behavior of the system variables during the present switching period and then to evaluate its average value, before the period is completed. The method allows to obtain simultaneously the average value of currents and voltages, to get rid of the delay introduced by filtering, and to avoid the drawback of sampling in the measurement, i.e. aliasing. In this work, an overview of the standard measuring methods for switched power converters is first presented. The problematics that arise from the sampling process are also discussed. Next, the theoretical grounds of the method are developed and the tools needed to implement it are derived. To illustrate its applicability, the method is used first in DC-DC converters, where the case of the buck converter is analyzed in detail. Similarly, the method is applied to a three-phase two-level voltage source converter. In both cases, simulation results and experimental verification are presented for different operational modes. The usage of the method in open and closed loop is discussed, and its effect in the system behavior is shown. The performance of the prediction method is contrasted with other standard measuring methods.