Capacitors are widely used in dc links of power electronic converters to balance power, suppress voltage ripple, and store short-term energy. Condition monitoring (CM) of dc-link capacitors has great significance in enhancing the reliability of power converter systems. Over the past few years, many efforts have been made to realize CM of dc-link capacitors. This article gives an overview and a comprehensive comparative evaluation of them with emphasis on the application objectives, implementation methods, and monitoring accuracy when being used. First, the design procedure for the CM of capacitors is introduced. Second, the main capacitor parameters estimation principles are summarized. According to these principles, various possible CM methods are derived in a step-by-step manner. On this basis, a comprehensive review and comparison of CM schemes for different types of dc-link applications are provided. Finally, application recommendations and future research trends are presented.

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An Overview of Condition Monitoring Techniques for Capacitors in DC-Link Applications

A single-inductor dual-output (SIDO) buck–boost power factor correction (PFC) converter operating in critical conduction mode is proposed in this paper. By multiplexing a single inductor, each output of the SIDO buck–boost converter can be regulated independently. Compared with a conventional two-stage multiple-output converter, the SIDO buck–boost PFC converter benefits from significant overall cost saving, small size, and light weight. Moreover, the efficiency of the SIDO buck–boost PFC converter can be improved due to single-stage power conversion. The control strategy and characteristics of the proposed converter are analyzed. The efficiency, power factor, total harmonic distortion, and output accuracy are verified using the experimental results.

Single-Inductor Dual-Output Buck–Boost Power Factor Correction Converter

Passive or active current balancing circuits are usually used to mitigate current imbalance in driving multiple light-emitting-diode (LED) strings. Passive current balancing schemes adopting capacitors with high reliability, small size and low cost are very popular in many applications. However, the high reactive power of the capacitive balancing scheme with variable frequency control will bring high power stress on the VA rating of the main switches which drive this passive current balancing circuit and decrease the overall efficiency. Fixed frequency control does not permit zero-voltage switching (ZVS) under load variations. Hence, this paper proposes a current-source-output LED driver based on LCLC resonant circuit to provide a constant output current regardless of variations in LED parameters. In the LCLC circuit, the number of additional capacitors is scalable with the number of LED strings for current balancing. Moreover, the input impedance of the improved LCLC circuit is designed to be resistive at the operating frequency to minimize reactive power. The conventional duty cycle control can easily incorporate ZVS. The analysis, implementation and verification are detailed in this paper.

An Improved LCLC Current-Source-Output Multistring LED Driver With Capacitive Current Balancing

A 1 MHz half-bridge resonant dc/dc converter based on GaN FETs and planar magnetics is proposed in this paper, which improves the system efficiency and power density. The resonant network can achieve satisfactory soft-switching characteristics based on a small impedance angle, which greatly reduces the losses of switches and diodes. The losses characteristics during the turn-on and turn-off transitions are analyzed in detail. The calculation results show that the GaN FETs with low output capacitance and on resistance can achieve fast switching speed and low losses in high-frequency conditions. To reduce the profile and increase the power density of the system, planar magnetics are used in this paper. The response surface methodology (RSM) and modular layer model (MLM) are adopted to help design the planar inductor and transformer, respectively. Both of the methods offer clearer and more effective ways to design the planar magnetics. A 25-W prototype is built to verify the feasibility of the proposed high-frequency converter.

A 1 MHz Half-Bridge Resonant DC/DC Converter Based on GaN FETs and Planar Magnetics

There is an emerging application, which uses a mixture of batteries within an energy storage system. These hybrid battery solutions may contain different battery types. A dc-side cascaded boost converters along with a module-based distributed power sharing strategy has been proposed to cope with variations in battery parameters such as, state-of-charge (SOC) and/or capacity. This power sharing strategy distributes the total power among the different battery modules according to these battery parameters. Each module controller consists of an outer voltage-loop with an inner current-loop where the desired control reference for each control-loop needs to be dynamically varied according to battery parameters to undertake this sharing. As a result, the designed control bandwidth (BW) or stability margin of each module control-loop may vary in a wide range, which can cause a stability problem within the cascaded converter. This paper reports such a unique issue and thoroughly investigates the stability of the modular converter under the distributed sharing scheme. The paper shows that a cascaded PI control-loop approach cannot guarantee the system stability throughout the operating conditions. A detailed analysis of the stability issue and the limitations of the conventional approach are highlighted. Finally in-depth experimental results are presented to prove the stability issue using a modular hybrid battery energy storage system prototype under various operating conditions.

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Control of Cascaded DC–DC Converter-Based Hybrid Battery Energy Storage Systems—Part I: Stability Issue

In boost power factor correction (PFC) converters, a low-pass filter (LPF) is generally adopted to eliminate the influence of the double-line frequency output voltage ripple on the controlled input current, which, therefore, limits the outer-voltage loop bandwidth. Different from the existing alternative schemes to the LPF, which eliminate the influence of the output voltage ripple using output-feedback ways in the outer-voltage loop, this article proposes a current feedforward scheme in the inner-current loop to remove the LPF. In the proposed scheme, the harmonic distortion of the reference current is suppressed by using a current-harmonic feedforward compensation way in synchronous reference frame. Finally, a 225-W experimental prototype is built with digital implementation, and the experimental results show a more than 68% improvement of the dynamic response for the case with the proposed scheme as compared with the traditional LPF scheme, along with a high-quality controlled current.

Improving Dynamic Performance of Boost PFC Converter Using Current-Harmonic Feedforward Compensation in Synchronous Reference Frame

Summary
In this paper, a dynamic resonant perturbation (DRP) method is proposed to control sub-harmonic oscillation in a peak current mode controlled buck converter. Different from the traditional non-feedback resonant parametric perturbation method, the proposed DRP method extracts an approximate sinusoidal control signal from the output voltage. The self-stabilizing condition for the designed control signal is presented, and its analog circuit implementation is given as well. Furthermore, the system stability boundary is obtained by investigating the system eigenvalues, and the control parameter is effectively determined. The presented simulation and experiment results show that the proposed DRP method eliminates sub-harmonic oscillation without sacrificing the peak value of the inductor current and features with a self-stabilizing characteristic for external condition changes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Control of sub-harmonic oscillation in peak current mode buck converter with dynamic resonant perturbation

This paper presents a multi-period frame transient switching control (MP-TSC) scheme for buck converter with a controlled coupled inductor, aiming at improving the load transient response. The proposed buck converter utilizes a controlled coupled inductor as the output inductor. During a load transient, the coupled inductor is controlled as a small equivalent inductance so as to achieve fast transient regulation. While in the steady state, the coupled inductor behaves as a large inductance to reduce the output current ripple. Furthermore, on the basis of the proposed variable inductance circuit, an MP-TSC control scheme is proposed and implemented in a digital form. With the proposed control scheme, the load transient event is divided into n + 1 sub-periods, and in each sub-period, the capacitor-charge balance principle is used to determine the switching time sequence. Moreover, the control principle design and transient response index analysis are provided. Furthermore, its feasibility is validated in simulation and experiment with a 12–3.3V low-voltage high-current synchronous buck converter. Experimental results demonstrate that the voltage deviation of the proposed MP-TSC scheme (coupled coefficient of the controlled coupled inductor is 0.52) has improved by more than 79% compared to that with the auxiliary circuit disabled.

Multi-Period Frame Transient Switching Control for Low-Voltage High-Current Buck Converter With a Controlled Coupled Inductor

As for ripple-current mode control, it cannot achieve average current tracking, resulting in poor current accuracy and even current waveform distortion. Meanwhile, fast-scale instability may occur in some operating conditions. To solve these problems effectively, a current-ripple compensation (CRC) control technique is proposed in this paper. The error between the average of the controlled current and the reference current is compensated by certain compensation signal, achieving average current tracking while suppressing fast-scale instability. On this basis, the compensator in the outer-voltage loop is further simplified to a proportional part by introducing a rebuilt average reference current. The idea and design procedure of the proposed CRC control technique are discussed in detail. Accordingly, two available implementation schemes for the proposed CRC are presented, including slope compensated and parabolic compensated schemes. Finally, two application cases, respectively, to dc–dc Buck converter and Boost PFC converter, are presented to verify the proposed CRC control technique.

Current-Ripple Compensation Control Technique for Switching Power Converters

In this paper, a sequence switching control (SSC) scheme based on an auxiliary parallel inductor is proposed to improve the transient performance of buck converters. The proposed SSC scheme introduces a small controlled inductor in parallel with the output inductor, so as to increase the inductor-current slew rate when it is activated during a load transient. Furthermore, an “ n + 1” sequence switching strategy is proposed to control the auxiliary parallel inductor. The proposed scheme divides the transient event into n + 1 periods. In the former n periods, the same small output voltage deviations are designed, while in the last period, a smaller deviation is done for a smooth transition from the transient to the steady state. The switching sequence is derived applying the capacitor–charge balance principle for each of n + 1 periods. For a given buck converter in the experiment, the settling time and the output voltage deviation of the proposed SSC scheme enhance more than 50% and 67%, respectively, over those of the time-optimal control for a 3-A load step.

Weiguo Lu

Papers

Improving Dynamic Performance of Boost PFC Converter Using Current-Harmonic Feedforward Compensation in Synchronous Reference Frame

Control of sub-harmonic oscillation in peak current mode buck converter with dynamic resonant perturbation

Multi-Period Frame Transient Switching Control for Low-Voltage High-Current Buck Converter With a Controlled Coupled Inductor

Current-Ripple Compensation Control Technique for Switching Power Converters

An Auxiliary-Parallel-Inductor-Based Sequence Switching Control to Improve the Load Transient Response of Buck Converters