A Noble Approach for Generating Real Time Firing Pulse for Inverter Using Arduino and MATLAB/Simulink

This paper presents Arduino based gate pulse generation technique for firing power electronic switching elements including MOSFET and IGBT. In case of designing an inverter, triggering signal generation is necessary to fire the switching elements. The objective of this work is to generate gate pulse for triggering the switching element using real time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technique on MATLAB/Simulink environment. The logic block designed in MATLAB/Simulink is directly burned into Arduino’s flash memory without using any kind of coding technique. Control blocks are created in MATLAB/Simulink while measurement signals from the hardware circuit are taken into MATLAB/Simulink through serial communication protocol of Arduino. PWM signals are generated by Arduino using MATLAB/Simulink and sent to a power electronic converter. This method can be used to generate different types of pulse signal for various converter applications without programming complexity. Among all existing technique, the proposed technique is the cheapest and easiest to implement.