A specialized time-step control strategy for fast simulation of switching power electronic circuits

Simulation times of electric circuits containing switching power supplies not only depend on the algorithms used for solving the network equations but also on the choice of the time-step-control strategy. While generic simulation packages use the estimated truncation error to find the optimum time step, in this work a more specialized approach was followed. After studying the analytic solution and the simulation results of a circuit utilizing a pulse-with-modulation scheme it was found, that the switching intervals form adequate time-steps. To prove this, a basic simulation software was implemented and several simulations were conducted. Finally, the simulation accuracy was improved by introducing additional time-steps and impact on the convergence speed and memory consumption was studied.