Modeling and Control For A Bidirectional Buck-Boost Cascade Inverter
Modeling and Control For A Bidirectional Buck-Boost Cascade Inverter
3, MARCH 2012
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AbstractThis paper proposes a bidirectional buckboost cascade inverter and presents its modeling and control methods. The
proposed inverter can be seen as the cascade of a buck converter
and a boost converter, both with bipolar outputs. The buck stage
maintains the main inductor current and the boost stage controls
the output voltage to track a given reference. With detailed analysis, the switching function model is established, which reveals that
the inverter has an extra control freedom for achieving high performance. Then, the averaged model for control is given and thereby
the buckboost capability is proven. Afterward, utilizing the feedforward compensation technique, a decoupled control scheme is
designed. A new modulation strategy is also proposed to minimize
the dead time effect. By simulations and experiments, it is verified that the proposed system possesses the following features: 1)
bidirectional operation with bipolar buckboost output voltage; 2)
reduced output distortion due to advanced modulation minimizing
the dead time effect; 3) reduced size and weight with only one main
energy storage component; 4) decoupled linear controller design;
and 5) good steady-state and dynamic performance including wide
operation range, strong robustness to load and input voltage variations, fast dynamic response, and excellent overload protection.
Index TermsBidirectional converter, buckboost cascade converter, control system, inverter, modeling.
I. INTRODUCTION
ODAY, dcac inverters have been widely used in various
commercial and industrial areas such as motor driving,
energy storage, renewable energy generation, etc. The conventional voltage source inverter (VSI) (also referred to as the buck
inverter) has taken a very large market share in these applications. Inheriting the characteristics of the buck converter, the
VSI can only produce an output voltage lower than its dc input.
However, in some applications, e.g., motor driving in electric
vehicle systems [1][3] and grid-connected fuel cell or photovoltaic systems [4][6], both the step-down (buck) and step-up
(boost) operations are required. Sometimes, the bidirectional
power handling capability of the inverter is also desired in order
Manuscript received January 15, 2010; revised July 19, 2010 and November
2, 2010; accepted December 17, 2010. Date of current version February 7, 2012.
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant 60974130 and in part by the Power Electronics Science
and Education Development Program of Delta Environmental and Educational
Foundation. Recommended for publication by Associate Editor B. Johansen.
The authors are with the Department of Automation, TNList, Tsinghua
University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]; genghua03@gmail.
com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2010.2103957
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Fig. 1.
ZHOU et al.: MODELING AND CONTROL FOR A BIDIRECTIONAL BUCKBOOST CASCADE INVERTER
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Fig. 2. Conducting patterns and illustrative waveforms of the buck stage. (a) Positive bucking. (b) Free-wheeling. (c) Negative bucking. (d) Free-wheeling
(unused). (e) Illustrative waveforms.
i2 = Sb o ostOFF iL
u2 = Sb o ostOFF uOUT .
(6)
1
di
(7)
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Fig. 3. Conducting patterns and illustrative waveforms of the boost stage. (a) Positive Boosting. (b) Charging. (c) Negative Boosting. (d) Charging. (e) Illustrative
waveforms.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
linear for the control input Sb o ostOFF [17]. Then, there comes a
dilemma for the control: if Sb o ostOFF was used to perform current control, the output voltage would be strongly affected, but
if it was chosen to control the voltage, the current loop might be
heavily disturbed. For dcdc boost converters, this problem is
not so critical since its operation point is relatively constant and
some locally linearized control can achieve a good result. However, for dcac converters, large variation of the operation point
makes it very difficult to obtain a satisfactory dynamic performance in terms of reference tracking and disturbance rejection.
On the contrary, for the proposed buckboost cascade inverter, one more control freedom SbuckON can be utilized.
Therefore, decoupled control for the current and voltage is obtained: SbuckON is chosen to regulate the main inductor current
iL while Sb o ostOFF is used to control the output voltage uOUT .
With such a control strategy, simpler controller design and better performance can be expected. Detailed control schemes are
given in Section III.
III. SYSTEM CONTROL
A. Averaged Model for Control
For the sake of control, a locally averaged model is often
necessary [24]. Based on the switching function model (7), the
ZHOU et al.: MODELING AND CONTROL FOR A BIDIRECTIONAL BUCKBOOST CASCADE INVERTER
Fig. 6.
Fig. 7.
L = (DbuckON u
IN Db o ostOFF u
OUT )
dt
L
(8)
uOUT
1
d
= (Db o ostOFF iL iLoad )
dt
C
where the duty cycles DbuckON and Db o ostOFF are the local
average of SbuckON and Sb o ostOFF , respectively. Other barred
variables represent the local average of their counterparts in (7).
As previously mentioned in Section II, during normal operation, the inductor current iL is kept constant. Therefore, let
diL /dt = 0; from the first equation in (8), it can be found that
u
OUT =
DbuckON
u
IN .
Db o ostOFF
(9)
Since |DbuckON | , |Db o ostOFF | [0, 1], this equation effectively proves the buck/boost capability of the proposed system.
The overall control strategy can be divided into two parts:
the buck stage controls the current loop whereas the boost stage
controls the voltage loop.
B. Current Loop Design
The control objective of the buck stage is to regulate the main
inductor current to a positive value iL . From (8), in order to
eliminate the disturbances from the battery input and the boost
stage, a feedforward compensator can be designed
DbuckON
=
OUT
uL + Db o ostOFF u
u
IN
(10)
where DbuckON
and Db o ostOFF are the duty cycle commands
for the buck stage and boost stage, respectively. uL is the voltage
reference for the main inductor, normally given by the current
controller. After this compensation, the current channel simply
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becomes an integrator
1
diL
= uL .
(11)
dt
L
In order to eliminate the errors caused by parasitic parameters
and switching operation, a conventional proportional-integral
(PI) controller can be used to complete the current loop. The
current control scheme is shown in Fig. 6, where Ts in the filter
block is the switching cycle. The equivalent modulation block is
constructed according to (2). However, the sign of the equation
=u
1 /
uIN is utilized instead of the variable u
1 to
DbuckON
IN is
determine the value of SbuckON . This is simply because u
always positive. The actual implementation of the modulation
block that generates the gate pulses for the switching devices
will be given later.
C. Voltage Loop Design
The control objective of the boost stage is to control the
output voltage to follow the reference uOUT . From (8), in order
to eliminate the disturbances from the load and the buck stage,
a feedforward compensator can be designed
i + iLoad
Db o ostOFF = C
(12)
iL
where iC is the current reference for the output capacitor, normally given by the voltage controller. Similar to the current
loop, after this compensation, the voltage channel becomes an
integrator
1
d
uOUT
= iC .
(13)
dt
C
As a good starting point for most of the industrial applications, a
simple PI controller can be applied to complete the voltage loop.
The voltage control scheme is shown in Fig. 7. Note that the load
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TABLE I
OUTPUT LOGICAL OF THE STATE MACHINE
Fig. 8.
Fig. 9.
Fig. 10.
ZHOU et al.: MODELING AND CONTROL FOR A BIDIRECTIONAL BUCKBOOST CASCADE INVERTER
Fig. 11.
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Fig. 12. Simulation results with resistive load. (a) Output voltage, main inductor current, and load current. (b) Control variables of the buck and boost
stages.
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Fig. 13.
Experimental results with resistive load. (a) Output voltage and main inductor current. (b) Output voltage and load current.
Fig. 14.
Output voltage and load current with inductiveresistive load. (a) Proposed modulation method. (b) Conventional modulation method.
Fig. 15. Simulation results with regenerative load. (a) Output voltage, main
inductor current, and load current. (b) Control variables of the buck and boost
stages.
ZHOU et al.: MODELING AND CONTROL FOR A BIDIRECTIONAL BUCKBOOST CASCADE INVERTER
Fig. 16.
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Experimental results with regenerative load. (a) Grid voltage, output voltage, and input voltage. (b) Grid voltage and load current.
B. Steady-State Performance
1) Resistive Load: As the typical test for inverters, a resistive
load (RLoad = 110) is connected to the output of the inverter.
With 96-V dc input, the inverter is commanded to generate a
220 Vrms/50 Hz ac output. Simulation results are summarized in
Fig. 12. From (a), it can be seen that iL is successfully regulated
at 15 A by the buck stage. As a result, under the decoupled
control of the boost stage, the output voltage uOUT is also well
controlled. As to the control variables, since iL is maintained
constant, the waveform of Db o ostOFF will reflect the averaged
Fig. 17.
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Fig. 18.
Experimental results with input voltage and load variations. (a) Input voltage. (b) Output voltage and load current.
Fig. 19.
Output voltage and load current under VVVF operation. (a) Simulation results. (b) Experimental results.
control. But since this section only intends to verify the systems bidirectional capability, these issues will not be discussed
further. The results in Fig. 16(a) show that after grid connection,
the output voltage of the inverter is well synchronized with the
grid and Fig. 16(b) proves that the regenerative load current is
successfully injected into the inverter.
C. Dynamic Performance
1) Input Voltage and Load Variations: This section investigates the robustness of the proposed control to external disturbances. The first disturbance that should be considered is
the load variation. For switching power converters, both of the
nominal and light load conditions are concerned [26]. Besides
the requirements on a wide load operation range, the converter
should also be capable of dealing with sudden load changes. Another disturbance that should be noted is the variation of the input
voltage, which can easily cause instability of conventional boost
inverters [17]. In order to simulate these disturbances, a 100-Hz
10% square-wave is added to the input voltage and the resistive load suddenly switches from 10%(968 ) to 100%(96.8 )
and then switches back. Simulation results are shown in Fig. 17.
It can be seen that the input voltage disturbance has little effect
on the output voltage thanks to the feedforward design (10) of
the buck stage. A fast dynamic response to the large load variation can also be observed and there is only a very small variation
(about 40 V) of the output voltage during the transients. This superiority should be attributed to the proposed decoupled control
design with additional control freedom.
In the experiment, the output capacitor of the dc voltage
source is properly selected so that about 25-V ripple is generated under the nominal condition [see Fig. 18(a)]. The load
variation is created by switching the load between 200 and 120
manually. Similar results are obtained in the experiment; from
Fig. 18(b), it is evident that the input voltage and load variations
have little influence on the output voltage, further proving the
robustness of the proposed system.
2) Variable Voltage and Variable Frequency (VVVF) Operation: For motor driving applications, VVVF operation is often
desired so as to obtain a wide speed range with stiff torque characteristics [27]. This requires the inverter be able to operate in
a wide range in terms of both the frequency and the voltage. To
demonstrate such capability of the proposed system, a VVVF
command is applied to the inverter. Initially, the voltage and
ZHOU et al.: MODELING AND CONTROL FOR A BIDIRECTIONAL BUCKBOOST CASCADE INVERTER
Fig. 20.
Output voltage and load current. (a) Simulation results. (b) Experimental results.
Fig. 21.
Output voltage and main inductor current. (a) Simulation results. (b) Experimental results.
frequency commands are set to 220 Vrms and 50 Hz, respectively. From t = 0.08 s, both of them decrease with the time at a
slope of 200%/s until reach 20% of their rated values, i.e., 44
Vrms and 10 Hz, respectively. From Fig. 19, it can be seen that
the experiment is in good agreement with the simulation results.
With a fast dynamic response, the output voltage follows the
given command very well. Therefore, it can be concluded that:
1) the proposed system is able to generate an ac voltage higher
or lower than the dc input; and 2) it has a wide operation range
with satisfactory dynamic response.
3) Overload Protection: This section will demonstrate another merit of the proposed system and its control scheme. That
is, without adding extra control modules, the system is equipped
with good protection against overload. Initially, a 120- resistor
is connected to the inverter. To generate an overload condition, at
t = 0.105 s another 120- resistor is suddenly connected in parallel. System responses are shown in Figs. 2021. Immediately
after the overload occurs, the load current iLoad tends to rise
rapidly as observed in Fig. 20. This requires the boost stage to
output more current during a switching cycle. Subsequently, ac-
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APPENDIX A
MAIN CIRCUIT PARAMETERS
Rated power: P0 = 500 W.
Rated input voltage: UIN0 = 96 V.
Rated output voltage: UOUT0 = 220 Vrms.
Rated output frequency: f0 = 50 Hz.
Rated current of the main inductor: IL0 = 15 A.
Switching frequency: fs = 12.5 kHz.
Inductance of the main inductor: L = 3.3 mH.
Capacitance of the output capacitor: C = 12 F .
APPENDIX B
CONTROL SYSTEM PARAMETERS
Current controller: kp = 22.6, ki = 5.2.
Voltage controller: kp = 0.05, ki = 4.3.
Hysteresis voltage: uth = 10 V.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank G. Zhang and B. Lin for their
fundamental work on the DSP hardware platform.
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[3] P. W. Sun, J.-S. Lai, H. Qian, W. S. Yu, C. Smith, and J. Bates, High
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