An experimental comparison of several non linear controllers for power converters

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present an experimental comparative study of five controllers for boost DC-to-DC power converters recently reported in the control literature. They all enjoy some provable stability properties, which are briefly recalled in the paper. To carry out these experiments, the authors constructed a low cost electronic card, which captures the essential features of a commercial product, but with all the sensors required to monitor the behaviour of the system. The algorithms are compared with respect to ease of implementation, in particular their sensitivity to the tuning parameters, and closed-loop performance. The latter is evaluated with the standard criteria of steady-state and transient behaviour, and disturbance attenuation. Motivated by the experimental evidence, they propose several modifications to the basic schemes, for some of them they establish some new theoretical results.