ESIC Seminar

About the event

Nonlinear Oscillators for Modular Power Electronics Architectures to be presented by Dr. Brian Johnson, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington

Overview

Power electronics systems are commonly built by interconnecting multiple converters together. The particular way in which the converters are controlled is largely dependent on whether the system is ac or dc. For instance, parallel-connected ac converters must be synchronized to produce sinusoids of identical frequencies. Conversely, parallel dc-dc converters are often controlled such that the phases of their periodic switching are evenly dispersed or “interleaved.” Here, we consider a nonlinear control strategy that takes the form of an oscillator and show that a simple sign flip on the measured feedback signal yields either synchronized or interleaved behavior in multi-converter systems. This insight allows us to repurpose the same nonlinear controller for both dc and ac applications. 

Bio

Brian Johnson obtained his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 2010 and 2013, respectively. He is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Assistant Professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to joining the University of Washington in 2018, he was an engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Johnson was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2010 and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion. His research interests are in renewable energy systems, power electronics, and control systems.