Chapter 9 - Open-Loop Control for Digital Power Electronics

The insertion of communication networks in closed-loop of digital control systems makes the system synthesis and analysis complex. In this paper, we consider the combination of classical reliability, risk and safety evaluation with typical control system through digital networked control systems. The main purpose is to study the influence of transmission delays and packet dropouts on the reliability of digital networked control systems by using a modified statistical method-Monte Carlo simulation. The behaviors of two types of fault are modelled by different statistical distribution. The control strategies we apply for digital control systems are Proportion Integration Differentiation control strategies, generated by Genetic Algorithm. In terms of a realistic system model, we evaluate and compare the influences on the reliability of digital networked control systems with different control strategies from quantitative aspect. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and correctness of the approach.

The article discusses an approach that allows you to move from a discrete model of a digital controller to its analog representation, which provides analysis and synthesis of digital systems in the continuous domain, taking into account the quantization period. In the proposed method for the control system, a transition is made from the discrete z-region to the Laplace region. This approach makes it possible to consider the quantization time as an additional parameter of the digital control system settings, evaluate the influence of the selected quantization period not only on the behavior of the set for discrete at the moments of quantization, but also in between, to evaluate the temporal characteristics of the control system at any time. The analog representation of the digital controller enables the calculation of transients using MatLAB. The article provides examples of the synthesis for a digital control system in the frequency domain based on the frequency response characteristic of an open-loop control system taking into account the quantization period. The method can be used by automation specialists to analyze and setting digital control systems

Recently, the Plant Input Mapping (PIM) method was proposed as a digital-redesign (or an emulation) approach in digital control system design. This method guarantees stability of a redesigned digital control system for a wide range of sampling periods. In this paper the PIM method is applied to the design of a digital model-matching flight control system. In the model-matching control system design a plant must have no unstable zeros. However, unstable zeros appear for small sampling periods in a step invariance model of a continuous-time (CT) plant with the relative degree greater than two, even if the CT plant has no unstable zeros. Hence, in such a case, the direct-digital approach cannot be applied to the design of a digital model-matching control system. By contrast, the digital-redesign approach such as the Tustin's method or the PIM method is free from the problem. Simulation results for an unstable VTOL aircraft show that the proposed method gives better performance than the conventional design methods.

A digital closed-loop control system with all digital phase locked loop (ADPLL) is designed and optimized, in order to improve the bias stability and transient response of the gyroscope. The nonlinear mathematical models for the closed-loop amplitude and phase control system are established. The linearization method is applied to analyze the nonlinear models. The control parameters of the drive loop are optimized. The experimental results show that the phase deviation between the demodulation reference signal of the drive loop and the sense signal is less than 0.25° in the temperature range from-40°C to 60°C, within 0.15° of the variation. At room temperature, the overshoot amount of the gyroscope control system is 4.5% with setting time of 0.12s. The bias stability is 1.45°h. Compared to the analog control scheme, the digital control system has advantages of short setting time, small overshoot, short phase locked time, large locked range, high phase precision, etc.

With the development of modern automatic control technology, digital control technology has advanced technology and inherent advantages compared with traditional analog control technology. Therefore, the use of digital instrument and control system has become an inevitable trend of global nuclear power construction. Nuclear power embedded real-time operating system is an important part of digital instrument and control system in nuclear power plant. It is responsible for managing the hardware resources of the whole system and providing operation environment for application software. Its safety directly affects the safety of instrument and control system. This paper studies the application of embedded information technology in the safety of nuclear power plant, and puts forward a safety related scheme of embedded information system. The scheme fully considers the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information in the digital instrument and control system of nuclear power plant. The application results show that the scheme can meet the information security requirements of nuclear power instrument and control system, and has reference and guiding significance for the research and development of nuclear power embedded real-time operating system.

The DC-DC converters at the Advanced Photo Source at Argonne National Laboratory are over 15 years old. An upgrade to digital control system is being evaluated to resolve the aging and obsolescence issues. These converters supply power to electromagnets that are used to guide high energy beams. Thus a highly accurate control system is required for the DC-DC converters. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a digital control system to regulate the output current. The digital control system is proposed to replace the current analog control system thereby resolving the aging and obsolescence issues. A digital controller is first designed based on the small signal model of the converter. Experimental data of the output current is analyzed. The complete control system is then simulated and results are evaluated.

Beginning with process controls in the mid fifties, digital control systems have seldom met all the claimed advantages and in many cases have been outright failures. Airborne digital computers have just begun to appear in the commercial jet transport market after several years of experimental and military development. The success of these systems in meeting user expectations has not been overwhelming, which leads to the question: Why change from known analog flight control technology to digital? This paper examines that question by reviewing the state of the art in analog flight control system technology and evaluating this against current airline problems. A realistic means of evaluating claimed advantages for new technology is thus established. The advertised solutions of digital technology to analog problems are examined and, in some cases, debunked. However, consideration of the real problems and the capabilities of digital systems leads to the conclusion that there is a real payoff. Evidence from background studies at Boeing is offered to support this conclusion. A description of the digital flight control system electronics (FCSE) development program for the new Boeing 7×7 airplane is also provided. This program is currently in progress, and its specific objective is to assure that the real payoff is achieved for the subsequent production system.

The digital control system of modular multilevel converters (MMCs) normally synchronizes with the switching actions. The switching frequency of an MMC is generally selected as low as possible from an efficiency point of view, which leads to an unavoidable and relatively long time delay in the control system. Such a time delay might deteriorate the MMC performance and even reduce the stability margin by introducing infinite uncertain eigenvalues into the system state functions. Without a proper time-delay model and quantitative system stability analyses, MMCs might suffer from uncertainties and unstable risks during their operations, especially when the switching frequency is low. This paper derives an MMC model considering the time delay in the digital control system. A Pade-based stability analysis method is then proposed, which consists of three steps: information integration and critical eigenvalue extraction, and trajectory visualization and critical angle (CA) calculation, and quantitative assessment and extreme value determination. By the proposed model and method, the critical eigenvalue can be effectively extracted. With the Hopf bifurcation, the time delay in the digital control system induces a pair critical conjugate eigenvalues into MMC systems, which is detected as an instability cause. The CA and the critical impact are defined to quantitatively assess the stability, while selecting the controller parameters and minimum switching frequency. The proposed method for the MMC stability assessment is experimentally verified.

Considering characteristics of nuclear power plant digital instrumentation and control system, challenges of reliability assessment of digital instrumentation and control system are pointed out. As for its dynamic behavior and multi-states failure mode, limitation of traditional methods, research status and applicability of dynamic flowgraph methodology and other advance dynamic reliability assessment approach were introduced and compered. It's concluded that Dynamic flowgraph methodology maybe the dominant one in future after simplify its model procedure and reduction computational cost of its deductive analysis.

This paper focus on the digital control system for bearingless permanent magnet rotor motors. The bearingless permanent magnet synchronous motor (BPMSM) is an innovational type of motor, as bearingless motors have all advantages of magnetic bearings, they play an important role in solving difficult problems of special electric drives in life science, chemical processing industry, semiconductor manufacturing industry, foodstuff processing industry, and so on. In the paper, based on the basic working principle of BPMSM, the mathematics models of the radial forces and rotation part on BPMSM are deduced by adopting rotor magnetic field oriented control (FOC) strategy. A digital vector control system according to the demand of decoupling is designed and presented using DSP technique. An experimental platform of digital control system is developed to meet the need, The experiment results have shown that the steady suspension of the rotor is realized and the speed of the rotor can be continuously adjusted within the range of 0-3000 r/min.

Real-time programming has always been one of the most challenging programming disciplines. Real-time programming requires comprehensive command of sequential programming, concurrency, and, of course, time. Real-time programming has many application domains. In this chapter, however, we structure our discussion around digital control systems for the following two reasons. Firstly, digital control systems represent a large portion of real-time software in a diverse set of industries. Examples include automotive power train control systems, aircraft flight control systems, electrical drive systems in paper mills, or process control systems in power plants and refineries. Many of these systems distribute their components over networks with significant communication delays. Therefore, we also discuss networked real-time programming (Section 7). The second reason is pedagogical. Digital control is defined by a set of abstractions that are real-time programmable and mathematically tractable in the context of the dynamics of physio-chemical processes. The abstractions clearly define what application engineers (control engineers) expect of real-time programming. These abstractions therefore constitute a precise definition of the real-time programming problem (Section 2). Control engineers design in difference equations and often use modeling tools such as Simulink to simulate and validate their control models. The part of Simulink most commonly used to specify digital control, i.e., discrete-time with the discrete fixed-step solver and mode:auto, is well-explained by the so-called synchronous semantics [7, 38]. The key abstraction, we call the synchronous abstraction, is that any computation and component interaction happens instantaneously in zero time or with a delay that is exactly the same at each invocation. For example, if a controller computes every 20 msec, either the controller is assumed to read its inputs, compute its control, and write the corresponding outputs instantaneously at the beginning of each period in zero time, or to read its inputs instantaneously at the beginning of the period, compute during the period, and write the corresponding output exactly 20 msec (one period) later. In control parlance, these are the causal and strictly causal cases, respectively. Systems of difference equations can directly be expressed and structured in this model. The inclusion of strictly causal components (components with delays of a period or more) is typically required to break feedback loops and to account for the unavoidable computation or communication delays that will be present in the real control system. Real-time programmers design in interrupt handlers, device drivers, and schedulers, which are concepts on levels of abstraction that are obviously unrelated to difference equations. The result is a conceptual and technical disconnect between control model and real-time code that bedevils many control building projects. The control engineer specifies a Simulink design the real-time programmer finds unimplementable. The realtime programmer then fills in gaps to produce an implementation the control engineer finds uncontrollable. The process of interaction as the two iterate to produce a correct design is prolonged by the different backgrounds of control engineers and real-time programmers. This gap explains many of today’s problems in real-time software design for digital control such as high validation and maintainance overhead as well as limited potential for reusability and scalability.

A digital control system has been developed to control the frequency of an alternator operating at variable speeds. The power line frequency or a crystal controlled oscillator can be used as the reference frequency. The alternator output has a ±0.2 percent tolerance to the reference signal after the frequency control system was added. The frequency control of the alternator was accomplished by switching windings in the alternator field. The method is applicable to wind-powered alternators where the speed is variable and a constant 60 Hz output is desired.

Development of a digital reactor control and protection system

A digital control system is probably the best technical solution to the problem of automatic control of the Virgo interferometric antenna for gravitational wave detection, provided that very critical specifications concerning residual noise introduced by the digital system in the measurement band are met. For this purpose, a model of the digital system has been developed and tested to quantify the main sources and levels of noise. Experimental measurements, obtained using a prototype of the automatic control system, and theoretical analysis of the performances of the digital control loops have demonstrated the feasibility of a digital control system.

To produce a comfortable breeze similar to a natural one, a digital open-loop control system was utilized to control the speed of a small fan motor with 1/f fluctuation. The system was modeled as a first-order lag element with a time constant of 1.1 s. The output was controlled by commands and produced 1/f fluctuations, even though it was an open-loop system when the holding time of the data for 1/f fluctuation was set at more than 2 s. >