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A DSP-Based Single-Phase AC Power Source

Kay Soon Low, Member, IEEE
Abstract This paper presents the development of a singlephase ac power source, which is capable of generating highquality sinusoidal waveforms with adjustable amplitudes and frequencies over a wide range. Moreover, various types of arbitrary waveforms can also be generated. The system consists essentially of a well-controlled single-phase pulsewidth modulated inverter. To perform tight closed-loop control of the inverter, a digital controller based on the generalized predictive control approach has been developed. The controller gains are determined by minimizing a cost function that reduces both the tracking error and the control signals. To evaluate the proposed approach, a digital-signal-processor-based experimental prototype has been constructed. Experimental results under various loading conditions have demonstrated that the system performs well. Index Terms Power supplies, predictive control, pulsewidth modulated inverters.

I. INTRODUCTION

N THE laboratory, many experimental setups require the use of different ac sources in terms of the voltage amplitude, frequency, and the types of waveform. For instance, the testing of an ac machine requires a full range of ac voltages at different frequencies. The evaluation of a universal power supply requires an ac source that can provide 85250 V at 4763 Hz. The study of some electronic circuits, such as the synchro resolver converter, may need a sinusoidal supply at various voltages and frequencies. An ac power source may also be used as a test instrument for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) by simulating the various power problems that can occur on the ac mains, such as frequency variations, brownouts, noise voltages, etc. In the factory, it may also be useful in an automated production line for checking the device under test (DUT) in a specied operating range of voltages and frequencies. Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the AC power source that is being considered. It consists of a full-wave rectier, an inverter, and a digital signal processor (DSP)-based digital controller. In the system, the most important mechanism is to convert the rectied dc voltage to the desired ac waveform through an inverter LC lter block. To achieve the desired tracking performance and attain good robustness with respect to load disturbances or parameter variations, an advanced control scheme that can be realized in real time is needed to perform tight closed-loop control. Various control techniques have been reported in the literature to control a single-phase inverter [1][5] for use in a UPS. In [5], we have reported the use of the generalized predictive control (GPC) scheme
Manuscript received November 3, 1998; revised February 16, 1999. Abstract published on the Internet June 18, 1999. The author is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798. Publisher Item Identier S 0278-0046(99)07251-2.

to control the inverter. In this paper, we further develop the approach to track a wide range of desired arbitrary waveforms that can be set by the user in real time. GPC belongs to the class of model-based controller design concepts, that is, a model of the process is explicitly used to design the controller. In contrast to other approaches, GPC employs a strategy known as the receding-horizon approach [6]. Based on the system model, GPC predicts the output of the plant over a time horizon based on the assumptions about the future output sequences of the controller. An appropriate sequence of the control signals is then calculated to reduce the tracking error by minimizing a quadratic cost function. This process is repeated for every sample interval. Thus, new information can be updated regularly. Consequently, this approach gives robust performance against modeling errors and disturbances. As compared to the linear quadratic (LQ) controller, both approaches are designed based on the minimization of a certain criterion function. The fundamental difference between the two approaches is the receding-horizon approach with a xed-length prediction horizon employed by GPC in contrast to a decreasing-length prediction horizon employed by the LQ controllers [7]. The criterion function for the LQ approach, is minimized only once (at whereas the GPC approach minimizes the criterion function regularly. Thus, future disturbances and modeling errors can be well handled by the GPC controller. GPC has been used successfully in various process control industries [8], [9] and has proven to be an effective and reliable control methodology. Its applications in the process industries include steel casting, glass processing, oil renery, pulp and paper industries, etc. It has also been investigated in the area of motion control [10], [11]. In this paper, we explore its application in the control of the inverter with adjustable references. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for controlling the system is examined. The dynamic performance and the robustness property are demonstrated using an experimental prototype. The results have shown that the ac power source performs reasonably well. II. DISCRETE-TIME STATE-SPACE MODEL OF THE PWM INVERTER The system consists essentially of a single-phase inverter with an LC output lter (Fig. 1). The switching sequence of the inverter is determined by the DSP such that the resultant output voltage tracks the desired waveform chosen by the user. and its Dene the state variables as the output voltage derivative, i.e., (1)

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To eliminate steady state error, (4) is augmented to yield the following new system:

(5) Dene a new state vector as

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the system.

(6) then (5) can be rewritten using the following state-space equation: (7) where

Furthermore, we let the output of the system be the output seconds voltage. Assuming that the input is delayed by due to the computation delay in the controller calculations, then the system in Fig. 1 can be modeled using the following second-order state-space model: (2) (3) where

The output variable is now redened as (8) where From the state-space equations (7) and (8), we can now design a suitable controller and state observer for the system. The development is discussed in the next section. III. CONTROL SYSTEM In this section, we rst develop the digital controller using the GPC approach. We then discuss the selection criterion of the control parameters that are used in GPC. As the approach requires the knowledge of all the state variables, a state observer is developed assuming that only a voltage sensor is used. A. GPC The model of the plant derived in Section II shows that the system can be subjected to unknown load disturbances. Moreover, the parameters of the LC lter may be different from the nominal values. To obtain a robust system, a generalized predictive controller is developed to achieve tight closed-loop control of the inverter. The basic idea of GPC is to calculate a sequence of future control signals in such a way that it minimizes a criterion function dened over a user-specied prediction horizon. The index to be optimized is the expectation of a quadratic function, which measures the difference between the predicted system output and some predicted reference sequence over the horizon plus a quadratic function measuring the control effort. The key

In the above system, is the input voltage, is the output current, and is the equivalent series resistor (ESR) of the inductor. In this modeling, the ESR of the output lter capacitor has been neglected, as it is small. By treating the disturbance as an unmeasurable variable, the discrete-time state-space model of the system can be expressed as

(4) where is the sampling time of the system, time index and is the discrete-

and

is the difference operator such that

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Fig. 2. Step response of the system (vertical: volt; horizontal: sample number).

feature of the approach is its employment of the receding horizon control strategy. In this strategy, a sequence of future control signals is calculated from the optimization process. However, only the rst element of the future control signals is applied to the system. At the next sampling interval, the control calculation is repeated again with the new available information. Consequently, the performance of the system becomes more robust as new information is updated regularly. In this paper, we dened the desired output voltage as the sum of sinusoidal terms, i.e., (9) are the peak voltages and is the desired frewhere quency of the th sinusoidal term, respectively. Furthermore, we dene the control law as follows: (10) is the estimated state vector and are the where controller gains. as the prediction of Denote at time The controller gains and can be obtained by minimizing the following cost function:

control horizon. It denes the degree of freedom available for optimization. The above optimization problem can be solved using a variety of methods. For examples, some use the dynamic programming procedure, which involves the iteration of a Riccati equation, while others use a batch, least-squares optimization technique. In this paper, we use the least-squares approach following a development similar to that in [11]. B. Selection of Control Parameters The controller has three parameters that can be used for tuning, namely, the prediction horizon the control horizon and the control-weighting factor In general, the control horizon can be set to the number of underdamped poles of the system. The control-weighting factor is mainly used to ensure numerical stability and to smooth the control signal when measuring noise is signicant. In this paper, is xed at 0.5. With these settings, we can study the effect of on the system performance. We rst determine the controller set to the minimum value, i.e., the control gains with horizon. Using the calculated state feedback gains, the step response of the system with a reference voltage of 50 V is then incremented, and the corresponding is simulated. response is determined. This process is repeated for the range The results are shown in equal to two is unstable and Fig. 2. The response with equal to three, the response has a high is not shown. With overshoot and is oscillatory. The response becomes smoother is increased to and a smaller overshoot is observed as ve. Further increase in the prediction horizon results in an overdamped response. The rise time and settling times are as ten for the also increased. From these results, we select following illustration. C. State Observer In the controller design, we assume that all the states are available for feedback. In practice, we use only a voltage sensor for the state measurements. Other state variables are to be made available for feedback by using a state observer.

(11) with respect to and subject to the constraint that (12) in (11) is known as the prediction The parameter horizon. It denes the interval over which the tracking error is to be minimized. The control-weighting factor is used to penalize excessive control activity and to ensure a numerically is called the well-conditioned algorithm. The parameter

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Fig. 3. User interface display.

To construct the observer, we follow the same deterministic least-squares framework as in the controller design, that is, by minimizing a receding nite-horizon cost function related to the state estimation error. be the voltage measurement vector and be the Let incremental control signal vector (13) (14) Then, the observer is formulated as (15) and are the observer gains. These gains are where determined by minimizing the following cost function: (16) is the estimation horizon. The estimation horizon where determines the number of past samples used in the observer for reconstructing the state vector. It is a tuning parameter for the observer dynamics. IV. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION The controller and the state observer discussed in the previous section have been implemented using a TMS320C31based DSP board. In the system, the DSP board uses a slave processor TMS320P14 to generate a 10-b PWM waveform with a switching frequency of 25 kHz. The sampling period of the controller is set to 80 s, resulting in two PWM pulses per controller output. The LC low-pass lter is designed to have a cutoff frequency of 1.8 kHz. The prototype system is designed to produce an ac voltage of 080 V (peak) at 0100 Hz with a rated current of 10 A (peak). In the experiment, the dc-link voltage is 100 V. The output voltage is measured using a Hall-effect voltage sensor and is converted to digital signals via a 12-b ADC.
Fig. 4. Typical output voltage and current waveforms (vertical: Ch150 V/div; Ch25 A/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div).

In our prototype system, the user can set the desired waveform through a virtual instrument conguration using a personal computer. Fig. 3 shows the user interface display on the computer monitor. By using a mouse or a computer keyboard, the user can set the desired voltage amplitude and frequency of each sinusoidal term through the sliding bars on the screen. A total of six sinusoidal terms has been provided in this sample illustration. Fig. 4 shows the experimental result of the output voltage and current waveforms. In the experiment, the desired output voltage is set at 160 V (pp) with a xed frequency of 50 Hz. A constant resistive load has been connected to the output such that an output current of 20 A (pp) is drawn. The waveform is clearly sinusoidal with little distortion. The corresponding harmonic spectrum (Fig. 5) for the voltage waveform shows that the distortion is less than 2%. The transient response of the system can be demonstrated by using a triac with rated load connected. Fig. 6 shows the experimental result for a ring angle of 36 . In this test, a step change from no load to full load occurs at 36 and 216 . In spite of the large transition in the loading condition, the result shows that the output voltage gives the desired 160-V (pp) sinusoidal voltage at 50 Hz. The dynamic performance remains

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Fig. 5. Harmonic spectrum of the voltage waveform in Fig. 4 (vertical: 1 percent/div).

Fig. 8. Output voltage and current waveforms under capacitive load (vertical: Ch150 V/div; Ch25 A/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div).

Fig. 6. Output voltage and current waveforms under triac load (vertical: Ch150 V/div; Ch25 A/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div). Fig. 9. Output voltage waveforms at different frequencies (vertical: 10 V/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div).

Fig. 7. Harmonic spectrum of the voltage waveform in Fig. 6 (vertical: 1 percent/div).

reasonably good. The corresponding harmonic spectrum of the voltage waveform is shown in Fig. 7. Next, we investigate the performance of the ac power source with a capacitive load. In this experiment, the output of the ac power source is connected to a bridge rectier that has a capacitor and a load resistor connected in parallel to its output. In the experiment, a large capacitor (470 F) is used. As the

Fig. 10. Output voltage waveform of 60 3 (sin 80t +0:2 sin 320t +0:3 sin 480t): (vertical: 25 V/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div).

LC lter of the inverter uses a 10- F capacitor, this effectively alters the lter characteristics, as well as the system model. The output load resistor is adjusted until the output current of the ac power source reaches 20 A (pp). Fig. 8 shows the output voltage and current waveforms with a 100-V (pp) and 50-

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the GPC approach has been developed to control the inverter for tight closed-loop control. The gains of the controller are obtained by minimizing a cost function, which can be adjusted by changing the prediction horizon, the control horizon, and the control-weighting factor. To verify the proposed scheme, various experiments have been conducted using a prototype system constructed for this study. The results have demonstrated that the system performs well. REFERENCES
[1] S. L. Jung and Y. Y Tzou, Discrete sliding-mode control of a PWM inverter for sinusoidal output waveform synthesis with optimal sliding curve, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 11, pp. 567577, July 1996. [2] M. Carpita and M. Marchesoni, Experimental study of a power conditioning system using sliding mode control, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 11, pp. 731742, Sept. 1996. [3] A. Kawamura, R. Chuarayapratip, and T. Haneyoshi, Deadbeat control of PWM inverter with modied pulse patterns for uninterruptible power supply, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 35, pp. 295300, May 1988. [4] A. V. Jouanne, P. N. Enjeti, and D. J. Lucas, DSP control of high-power UPS systems feeding nonlinear loads, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 43, pp. 121125, Feb. 1996. [5] K. S. Low, A digital control technique for a single phase PWM inverter, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 45, pp. 672674, Aug. 1998. [6] D. W. Clarke, Advances in model-based predictive control, Advances in Model-Based Predictive Control. New York: Oxford, 1994, pp. 321. [7] R. Soeterboek, Predictive ControlA Unied Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992. [8] T. Jolly and J. Bentsman, Generalized predictive control with dynamic ltering for process control applications, in Conf. Rec. American Control Conf., San Francisco, CA, 1993, pp. 17411745. [9] Q. Wang, T. G. G. Chalaye, and G. Gilles, An industrial application of predictive control to glass processWorking basin and feeder, in Conf. Rec. IEEE Conf. Control Applications, 1994, pp. 18911896. [10] L. Zhang and H. R. Norman, and W. Shepherd, Long-range predictive control of a current regulated PWM for induction motor drives using the synchronous reference frame, IEEE Trans. Contr. Syst. Technol., vol. 5, pp. 119126, Jan. 1997. [11] K. S. Low, K. Y. Chiun, and K. V. Ling, Evaluating generalized predictive control for a brushless DC drive, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 13, pp. 11911198, Nov 1998.

Fig. 11.

Harmonic spectrum of the voltage waveform in Fig. 10.

Fig. 12.

Output voltage waveform of 60 3 (sin 80t + 0:3 cos 80t + 0:3 sin 240t + 0:4 cos 240t + 0:3 sin 400t) (vertical: 25 V/div; horizontal: 5 ms/div).

Hz reference. The result shows that the tracking performance remains satisfactory. Fig. 9 shows some of the typical output voltage waveforms at different frequencies (20, 33.33, 40, and 50 Hz) with xed voltage amplitude of 100 V (pp) under 20-A (pp) load conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed controller in tracking a complex waveform is demonstrated in Fig. 10. In this test, a reference voltage of 120 V (pp), 40-Hz sine wave, with a 20% fourth harmonics and 30% sixth harmonics is used. The corresponding harmonic spectrum (Fig. 11) clearly shows that the desired waveform is obtained correctly. Fig. 12 depicts another set of waveforms with a more complicated harmonic content. V. CONCLUSIONS A DSP-based single-phase ac power source has been successfully developed. In this system, a digital controller using

Kay Soon Low (M88) received the B.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore, Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, both in electrical engineering. He is currently a Lecturer in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His funded projects are in the areas of advanced motion control systems and power electronics systems. His research interests include industrial drives, control of power electronics, and digital signal processing. Dr. Low is active in IEEE activities and is a Committee Member of the Singapore Chapter of the IEEE Industry Applications Society.

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Advanced Precision Linear Stage for Industrial Automation Applications

Kay-Soon Low, Senior Member, IEEE, and Meng-Teck Keck
AbstractIn the area of factory automation, accurate positioning systems are increasingly required in various industries to improve the productivity and to lower the manufacturing cost. In this paper, we present a prototype precision linear stage. It has a positioning accuracy of 1 m and a peak speed above 1 m/s. A permanent magnet dc linear motor has been used in the system as the actuator to eliminate the need for mechanical transmission from the rotary to linear motion. To achieve a fast and accurate closed loop response, we develop a state space predictive controller and a dynamic friction compensation system for the precision stage. The system has been optimally tuned using the genetic algorithm. Some experimental results are presented. Index TermsFriction compensation, genetic algorithm, precision linear stage, predictive control.
Fig. 1. Experimental vision inspection system.

I. INTRODUCTION ITH the advancement of technology, many applications require precision linear stage or xy-tables for accurate positioning of equipment less than a ten micrometers, such as those in the microelectronics industry, precision laser cutting and engraving applications, optical fiber grating processes, integrated circuit leads inspection systems, coordinate measuring machines, etc. [1][3]. Traditionally, a rotary type brushless dc motor is often used as the actuator in the linear stage. To obtain the required linear motion, lead screw or other mechanical means are needed. For very high precision applications that require movement of few micrometers, such arrangements have limited performance and are often not suitable. In this paper, we describe our prototype system that uses a permanent magnet dc linear motor. This allows us to obtain a smooth direct linear thrust due to the lack of mechanical transmission devices. To obtain a robust and fast closed loop system, we design an advanced state space predictive controller to control the linear stage. The gains of the control system are optimally tuned using the genetic algorithm (GA). In the experimental system, the friction has detrimental effect on the system response especially for short distance move (less than 500 m). Thus, the friction model of the system has been experimentally determined and the instantaneous friction is estimated and used for the feedforward compensation. Different from most friction compensation schemes which use only the static friction-speed map, we use a dynamic friction model
Manuscript received December 13, 2000; revised January 20, 2003. K.-S. Low is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. M.-T. Keck is with the School of Information and Communications Technology, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2003.814355

that is able to describe complex friction behavior, such as the stick-slip motion, presliding displacement, Dahl and Stribeck effects, etc., in our system. The effectiveness of the prototype system has been evaluated. The experimental results have demonstrated that the system has performed well.

II. SYSTEM SETUP Fig. 1 shows the photograph of our prototype system whose primary application is integrated circuit leads inspection. The purpose is to ensure that the lead forms of the integrated circuits meet the PCB assembly requirements. This type of application is being increasingly used in factory automation due to the continuing increase in the lead count and tighter lead pitches of the integrated circuits. In this experimental system, the linear motor has a short moving coil secondary containing a three-phase winding known as the slider. It is positioned in the airgap between a U-shaped stationary permanent magnet primary, i.e., the magnet way. The travel length of the magnet way is 0.33 m. The slider (also known as the forcer) is attached to a platform that is supported by two low friction linear guides placed at two sides of the magnet way. In the setup, the linear motor is driven by a three-phase voltage source PWM inverter. To facilitate position measurement and to provide the commutation logic, a linear optical encoder with a resolution of 1 m has been used. Though a 10- m resolution is sufficient for the present vision inspection applications, a higher resolution encoder is used in the setup to provide the flexibility for reconfiguring the system for other future work. In the system, a 32-bit floating-point digital signal processor (TMS320C31) with a sampling period of 2 ms has been used.

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Fig. 2.

System modeling of the linear drive.

Fig. 3. Overall system block diagram.

Fig. 4.

Experimental friction-speed curve.

III. DYNAMIC MODEL OF THE LINEAR STAGE The linear drive of the stage uses a typical cascaded loop control structure. For the inner current control loops, two PI controllers have been used based on the well known vector control concept. Fig. 2 shows the simplified block diagram of the system. In the figure, and are the motor winding resistance is the viscous coefficient. is the mass and inductance. of the moving coil secondary plus the nominal weight of the , are the force constant and back emf camera system. constant. To model the precision stage, we define the following vectors: (1) (2) where and are the mechanical position and speed, respectively, and is the output of the integrator. Let be the sampling time of the system and the state variables as (3) where is the difference operator such that (4) then the discrete time state space model of the precision stage [3] can be expressed as (5) (6) are the system and input matrices which are where and functions of the motors parameters, the output matrix is a constant matrix defined as (7) With this state space model, we can now proceed to design the control system. This is discussed in the next section.

IV. DESIGN OF THE CONTROL SYSTEM In developing the precision stage, a predictive controller that incorporates the future reference information has been used for the system design. Since the task in our present integrated circuits leads inspection application is repetitive and the desired motion profile can be predetermined, it is advantageous to incorporate them into the controller as it improves the tracking performance and reduces the actuator requirements. The control law is formulated as (8) , are the controller gains and is the estimate where are the position reference vector and speed of . In (8), , reference vector, respectively. The lengths of the vectors depend on the prediction horizons used in the design. In this paper, the prediction horizon is set as 10 after trading off between the performance and computation time. Fig. 3 shows the overall system block diagram. To obtain well tuned controller gains, the genetic algorithm (GA) is employed as the optimization tool. GAs are global, parallel search techniques which emulate natural genetic operations [6]. As compared to other optimization techniques, such as the traditional gradient type optimization, GA obtains its optima by evolving from generation to generation without the needs of stringent mathematical formulation. The underlying basis of GA comprises a set of individual elements and a set of biologically inspired operators defined over the population itself. The potential solution is represented by a string, which is known as the chromosome. In this application, the chromosomes are represented in floating point number to encode the control parameters due to its ease in encoding and decoding the chromosomes. The chromosome is defined as shown in the equation at the bottom of the next page. To begin the optimization, the GA starts with a random initial population. The chromosomes then undergo three basic genetic operations: reproduction, crossover, and mutation. When

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a new organizm is to be created, two parents are chosen from the current population. Organizms that have high fitness scores are given a higher probability to be chosen as parents. In this paper, the fitness function to be minimized by the genetic algorithm is defined as Fitness (9) is the desired move time for the linear stage to where are the weighting reach the final position. In (9), , , and factors. To achieve a smooth motion, the position reference trajectory is computed as s-curve profile. With the system model (5) and (6), the control law (8), the fitness function (9), and the experimentally identified friction model to be discussed in the next section, the genetic algorithm can proceed its evolutionary process to optimize the system controller. The GA optimization is terminated after the average fitness and the best fitness converges to the same value over the iterated generations. From the study, it is found that this occurs around 1000 generations.

Fig. 5. Position responses for 30-cm move.

V. FRICTION MODELING AND COMPENSATION SYSTEM For a relatively short move that is less than 1mm, the disturbance caused by the friction becomes significant in the system response. This leads to deterioration in the performance. Thus, the friction is modeled in our system and the estimated value is used for the compensation. To model the friction accurately, we use the LuGre friction model [4], [5] instead of the commonly used static friction-speed map. Let , be the frictional force and the speed, respectively, then the friction dynamics is modeled as (10) where is a nonmeasurable state and the function is (11) where is the Coulomb friction, is the Stribeck velocity and is the static friction. With the internal state defined in (10), the dynamic friction is obtained as (12)

Fig. 6.

Motion profiles for 30-cm move.

where is the viscous friction coefficient, the parameter is the damping coefficient. the stiffness coefficient and

is

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Fig. 7. Position response of 2-cm move.

Fig. 8. Motor current response for 2-cm move.

With constant speed and , the steady-state friction characteristics can be derived by substituting (10) and (11) into (12) which yields (13) From (10)(13), it is clear that the complete friction model is characterized by the four static parameters , , , and , and the two dynamic parameters , . In our system, the four static friction parameters are determined by constructing the friction-speed map. The experimental friction map shown in Fig. 4 is obtained through moving the forcer with a series of extremely low and constant speed tests. GA is then used to search the optimal static parameters such that (13) fits the experimental data. The two dynamic parameters are determined indirectly by matching the simulated and experimental current command curves through tuning the dynamic friction parameters. With a sufficiently accurate friction model, the estimated frictional force is added into the current command as (14)

Fig. 9.

Position response for 500-m setpoint without friction compensation.

VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Various experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the prototype system. Fig. 5 shows the experimental results of a 30-cm position move with a settling time of one second. We observe from Fig. 5 that the actual position response follows the position reference trajectory accurately. Furthermore, it reaches the desired final position at the specified settling time. The inset of the figure shows a close up view of the tracking with a position resolution of 2 mm per division. The speed versus position curve in Fig. 6 shows that the actual motion trajectory follows very well with the desired motion profile. From both Figs. 5 and 6, we observe that the achievable peak speed reaches 1.127 m/s at half the move time (i.e., 0.5 s). This peak speed can be further increased

by specifying a higher gradient reference trajectory but at the expense of higher control signal. Next, we show another set of the experimental results with the required move distance reduced to 2 cm at a settling time of 0.5 seconds. The position response and the motor current response are shown in Figs. 7 and 8, respectively. It is clear from the results that the tracking performance is good. The inset of Fig. 7 shows a close up view of the tracking with a position resolution of 0.5 mm per division. The current response in Fig. 8 shows that there is distortion around 0.15 s due to the changes of friction. To study the problem due to the friction, performance degradation for a short move of 500 m is presented in Fig. 9. A settling time of 0.2 s is used in this test. The results show that the position response has a long settling time. The stick-slip phenomenon of friction causes the position response to distort when the motor reaches around the final 50- m position and degrades the system performance. With the friction compensation scheme

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Fig. 11. Position response for 500-m setpoint with friction compensation.

Experimental results of linear cycle test.

Fig. 10.

REFERENCES
[1] A. Hace, K. Jezernik, B. Curk, and M. Terbuc, Robust motion control of XY table for laser cutting machine, in Proc. IECON, vol. 2, 1998, pp. 10971102. [2] K. K. Tan, S. N. Huang, and H. L. Seet, Geometrical error compensation of precision motion systems using radial basis function, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 49, pp. 984991, Oct. 2000. [3] K. S. Low, Y. Z. Deng, M. T. Keck, and C. W. Koh, A high performance linear motor drive for integrated circuits leads inspection system, in Proc. IECON, vol. 3, 1998, pp. 13211325. [4] B. Armstrong-Helouvry, P. Dupont, and C. Canudas de Wit, A survey of models, analysis tools and compensation methods for the control of machines with friction, Automatica, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 10831138, July 1994. [5] C. Canudas de Wit and P. Lischinsky, Adaptive friction compensation with partially known dynamic friction model: Low velocities, Int. J. Adaptive Contr. Signal Processing, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 6580, February 1997. [6] D. E. Goldberg, Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

TABLE I SUMMARIZATION OF EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

in place, Fig. 10 shows that the tracking performance is significantly improved. Moreover, the stick-slip phenomenon is diminished and the settling time is much reduced. Table I summarizes the results of the experiments for Figs. 510. In general, large position reference command results in faster average and peak speeds. This leads to larger tracking errors during the transient. However, the steady error remains zero due to the integrator in the controller. Fig. 11 shows the performance of the linear stage using the linear step cycle based on the machine calibration standard BS3800. In the figure, there are three forward targets, an overrun of half target, three reverse targets followed by a final overrun of half target. For each target, the s-shape position profile of 10- m distance is used. The experimental results show that the actual motion follows the reference profile very well. Due to the short distance commanded in this test, the quantization step of 1 m of the linear encoder can be clearly observed. A Kalman filter has been implemented in the experimentally system (Fig. 3) to provide smooth estimated position and speed. The solid line that passes through the discrete steps in Fig. 11 is the estimated position from the Kalman filter. VII. CONCLUSION A precision linear stage has been successfully developed for the industrial automation applications. High closed loop performance has been demonstrated experimentally. The results have shown that the system has good tracking and steady state performance for both short and long distance moves.

Kay-Soon Low (SM00) received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore, Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 1994, as a Lecturer and subsequently became an Associate Professor. During 2001 and 2002, he worked with various technology startup companies to pioneer the R&D work in high data rate ultra wide-band (UWB) radio systems and to develop enterprise software. His funded projects are in the area of advanced motion control system, power electronics, and UWB radio. His research interests are in control of power electronics and drive systems, precision servo, and UWB radio. He has served as a consultant to many companies and holds several patents. Dr. Low is a Committee Member in the Industry Applications Society of the Singapore Chapter.

Meng-Teck Keck received the B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, Singapore. He has been a Lecturer at the School of Information and Communications Technology, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore, since 2000. He teaches internet computing, internetworking, systems programming, and wireless technology. He is the author of the book Systems Programming and Internet Computing (Englwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). His research interests include genetic algorithm, fuzzy logic, neural network, linear motor drive, and mobile and wireless communication systems.

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Model Predictive Control of Parallel-Connected Inverters for Uninterruptible Power Supplies

Kay-Soon Low, Senior Member, IEEE, and Runzi Cao
AbstractUninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) have been used in many installations for critical loads that cannot afford power failure or surge during operation. It is often difcult to upgrade the UPS system as the load grows over time. Due to lower cost and maintenance, as well as ease of increasing system capacity, the parallel operation of modularized small-power UPS has attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, a new scheme for parallel operation of inverters is introduced. A multiple-inputmultiple-output state-space model is developed to describe the parallel-connected inverters system, and a modelpredictive-control scheme suitable for paralleled inverters control is proposed. In this algorithm, the control objectives of voltage tracking and current sharing are formulated using a weighted cost function. The effectiveness and the hot-swap capability of the proposed parallel-connected inverters system have been veried with experimental results. Index TermsInverter, model predictive control (MPC), uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

I. I NTRODUCTION NINTERRUPTIBLE power supply (UPS) is used in many applications to provide reliable and well-regulated ac voltages for critical loads [1], such as computer servers, airtrafc control systems, medical and communication equipment, etc. In many installations, it is found that higher capacity UPS is needed to replace the existing UPS, as the system load grows over time. Such a situation could be resolved if modularized small-power UPSs are available with parallel-operation capability. A parallel UPS also has the advantage in terms of cost and maintenance as compared to the single higher power UPS. Moreover, it has, effectively, no single point of failure in the system, thereby offering signicantly higher level of availability. Commercially available ratings range from several kVA to hundreds of kVA. Most come with hot swappability and scalability with a redundancy option. For a typical UPS, one of the most essential modules is the bridge inverter with an LC lter block, as shown in Fig. 1. For simplicity, the fault detection, synchronization, and switchover modules of the UPS are not shown in the diagram.

Fig. 1.

Block diagram of parallel-connected inverters.

Manuscript received February 27, 2007; revised December 17, 2007. First published February 22, 2008; last published July 30, 2008 (projected). K.-S. Low is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (e-mail: k.s.low@ ieee.org). R. Cao is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, and also with Fugro Survey Pte. Ltd., Singapore 575625. Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIE.2008.918474

In the inverter, the most important mechanism is to convert the rectied dc voltage to the desired ac waveform through the inverter and lter block. To achieve the desired tracking performance and attain good robustness with respect to load disturbances or parameter variations, various advanced-control schemes for tight closed-loop control of a single pulsewidthmodulated (PWM) inverter have been actively researched [2][6]. In recent years, there are also increased research interests to develop new control approaches for parallel-connected PWM inverters that can be used in UPS applications [7][15]. Fig. 1 also shows the block diagram of the parallel inverters. It consists of two or more inverters and a digital-signal-processor (DSP)-based digital controller. Various control techniques have been reported in the literature to control parallel inverters. One of the frequently used methods is the frequency and voltage droop method [7]. This method achieves power sharing by making a compromise between voltage regulation and current sharing. In [8] and [9], the P/Q droop method is proposed to improve the transient response as compared to the traditional droop method. To obtain good performance on both the voltage regulation as well as the current-sharing control objectives, more sophisticated approaches based on instantaneous current-sharing control strategies are actively researched. Examples are the masterslave current-sharing method [10], [11], the circularchain current-sharing method [12], and the average currentsharing method [13], [14]. As compared with the droop method, these methods promise instantaneous current sharing. However, additional interconnections among inverters are usually needed, and the complexity compromises its dealing with failure.

0278-0046/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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Different from most methods that design the controller based on a transfer-function approach, a state-space-model-based model-predictive-control (MPC) controller is designed in this paper to systematically control the current and voltage. MPC is a digital-control strategy that was developed initially for the process-control industry in the mid-1970s. It is a model-based approach employing the receding-horizon scheme. Using the system model, the MPC predicts the output of the system over a time horizon based on the assumption about future output sequences of the controller. An appropriate control sequence is then calculated to reduce the tracking error by minimizing a quadratic cost function. However, only the rst element of the control signals is applied to the system. This process is repeated every sampling interval to allow regular updating of new information. Consequently, the MPC gives a good rejection against modeling errors and disturbances. MPC has been used successfully in various process-control industries, such as arc welding and sheet/lm processes [15], [16], and has proven to be an effective and reliable control methodology. It has also been investigated in the area of motion control [17], [18], single-phase inverters [20], [21], three-phase inverters [22], multilevel inverters [19], [23], and surgical robots [24]. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of MPC in the control of parallel-connected inverters. Different from previously reported works on MPC-based single-inverter and motion-control systems that are single-input and single-output, the system under consideration is multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) with multiple optimization objectives. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for controlling the system has been examined. The dynamic performance and the robustness property are demonstrated with experimental results based on a laboratory prototype. II. D ISCRETE -T IME S TATE -S PACE M ODEL OF THE P ARALLEL PWM I NVERTERS The system being investigated in this paper consists of essentially several single-phase inverters (Fig. 1) controlled by a single DSP. Besides ensuring that the resultant output voltage tracks the reference waveform, it is desired that the load current is equally supplied by the individual inverter. To design a suitable controller for the system, a discrete-time MIMO statespace model of the system is rst developed. Consider the general case that there are n inverters connected in parallel with the simplied model, as shown in Fig. 1. Dene r as the equivalent series resistor (ESR) of the inductor and neglect the ESR of the capacitor, as it is very small. Let V1 , V2 , . . . , Vn be the output voltages of the inverters, i1 , i2 , . . . , in be the currents owing through the inductors, and V0 be the output voltage of the parallel-connected inverters. Dene the state variables as Z(t) = [V0 i1 i2 in ]T (1)

where A= B=
1
n n

1
n

1 Cj
j =1

z
j =1

.. .

1
n

Cj
j =1

Cj r1 L 1 0 . . . 0

Cj
j =1

1 L 1 1 L 2 . . . 1 L n

0 r2 L 2 0

0 0 . . .
rn L n

0
1 L1

0 0
1 L2

0 . . . 0

. . . 0

.. .

0 0 0 . . .
1 Ln

V1 V2 . u(t) = . . . Vn

To achieve bias-free prediction, the incremental model is developed in the following. Let T be the sampling time of the system, and then the corresponding discrete-time state-space model of the system in (2) can be expressed as Z(kT ) + H u(kT ) Z(kT + T ) = G
T

(3)

= [ eA d ]B, and is the difference = eAT , H where G 0 operator. For the system, the output voltage and the current difference between adjacent inverters are chosen as the output variables, i.e., V (kT ) i1 (kT ) i2 (kT ) Y(kT ) = . . . in1 (kT ) in (kT ) Hence, the MIMO system in minimal realization after augmentation can be expressed as 0 Z(kT + T ) G = Y(kT ) C1 C2 where 0 C1 = . . . 1 0 1 . 1 . . .. . 0 0 .. . .. . 0 0 . . .
n(n+1)

. (4)

Z(kT ) H + u(kT ) Y(kT T ) 0 (5)

1 0 0 1 C2 = . . .. . . 0

1 1 0 . . . . 0 1 nn

and then the system in Fig. 1 can be modeled using the following state-space model [20]: (t) = AZ(t) + Bu(t) Z (2)

Dene a new state vector as X(kT ) = Z(kT ) Y(kT T ) (6)

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and then (5) can be rewritten using the following state-space equation: X(kT + T ) = GX(kT ) + Hu(kT ) Y(kT ) = CX(kT ) where G= H= G C1 H 0 C2 ]. 0 C2 (7) (8)

comprises voltage tracking and minimizing of circulating current among the inverters.

A. Controller Design The basic idea of MPC is to calculate a sequence of future control signals by minimizing a cost function dened over a user-specied prediction horizon. The approach employs the receding-horizon control strategy that uses only the rst element of the calculated future control signals. At the next sampling interval, the control calculation is repeated with the new available information. As new information is updated regularly, the system becomes robust. For the parallel-inverter system, the multivariable predictive controllers require a number of tuning parameters, namely, a prediction horizon Ny for each of the output variables and a control horizon Nu for each of the input variables, as well as performance weights for each output and input. To maintain the ease of tuning, the cost function is simplied as follows. 1) The prediction horizons for output-voltage tracking and current sharing are chosen to be the same. 2) The control horizons for the individual inverters are set to be the same. 3) The control weighting factors for the individual inverters are chosen to be the same. Based on these criteria, the simplied cost function is formulated as follows:

C = [C1

Using (7) and (8) and by repeated substitution for a prediction horizon Ny , we have the following prediction model: Yp (kT ) = X(kT ) + RUp (kT ) where Y(kT + T ) Y(kT + 2T ) Yp (kT ) = . . . Up (kT ) = Y(kT + Ny T ) u(kT ) u(kT + T ) . . . (9)

Ny

J =
j =1

0 (kT + jT |kT ) V0 (kT + jT ) V

Ny n1

u(kT + Ny T T ) CG 2 CG = . . . R= CG
Ny

+
j =1 l=1

il (kT + jT ) il+1 (kT + jT )

+ in (kT + jT ) i1 (kT + jT ) 0 . . . . 0 CH
Nu

CH CGH . . .

CGNy 1 H

. . CH . .. .. . . CGH 0

+
j =1

u(kT + jT T )

(10)

which is subjected to the constraints u(kT + jT T ) = 0n1 j > Nu (11)

With this incremental prediction model (9), we can now proceed to design the model predictive controller. III. MPC In this section, a digital controller using the MPC approach based on the model derived in Section II is developed. To obtain a robust system with respect to parameter variations and to ensure that each inverter shares the same current loading, a model predictive controller is developed in this paper to achieve the desired tight closed-loop control of the parallel inverters. The problem is formulated, as optimization of multiobjectives

o is the prediction of where n is the number of inverters, V output voltage of the system, and , , and are the weighting factors. The cost function (10) comprises the following three parts: the voltage-tracking error, the inverter-circulation current, and the quadratic measure of the control effort to limit large controlsignal variation. In (10), the current-sharing optimization is formulated as the difference between adjacent inverters. The last term in i1 in the second objective of (10) is introduced to place same weighting on i1 and in as the rest. When these

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objectives are optimized together, the net effect is that each inverter is compared with the nominal average current (1/n)I0 . Let U = [ u(kT ) u(kT + Nu T T ) ] and perform minimization of (10) with respect to U. After some algebraic manipulation, it can be proved that

where K = [1 0 0 ]1Nu

T MT RT W1 W1 RM 1 T T MT RT Wl +1 Wl+1 + M M l=1

T W1 RM U = MT RT W1 1 T T MT RT Wl +1 Wl+1 RM + M M l=1

n+1

n+1

T K1 = K MT RT W1

T K2 = K MT RT W1 W1 T MT RT W1 V (kT ) n+1

+
T MT RT W1 W1 l=1

T MT RT Wl +1 Wl+1 .

Fig. 2 shows the block diagram of the control system.

n+1

+
l=1

T MT RT Wl +1 Wl+1 X(kT )

B. Performance Analysis As mentioned in the previous section, the control objective is simplied to have the same prediction horizon, control horizon, and weighting factors. Consequently, the general tuning rules of prediction and control horizons for the multivariable MPC follows the tuning guidelines as in single-objective MPC. For the three weighting factors , , and in (10), they are used to tradeoff among the different objectives. As their ratios can be determined by any two weighting factors, we let = 1 and adjust and in the sequel. The internal stability of the system can be examined by ensuring the poles of the characteristic equation |z I (G + HK2 )| = 0 (15)

(12) where the denitions of M, W1 , and Wl+1 are shown at the bottom of the page. As the control law uses the receding-horizon scheme, the control signal uses only the rst element of (12), i.e., u(kT ) = [ 1n1 0 0 ]nNu U. (13)

By substituting (13) into (12), the state-space predictive-control law can be formulated as u(kT ) = K1 V (kT ) + K2 X(kT ) (14)

lie within the unit circle. In the experimental system, the parameters are tuned as Ny = 5; Nu = 2; = 1; = 4; and = 30. Fig. 3 shows the movement of the pole when one of

1n1 0n1 0n1 1n1 . .. . . . M = 0n1 0n1 0n1 . . . 0n1 01l 1 01(n2) 01l 0 01(n2) Wl+1 = . .. .. . . . . 01l

0n1 0n1 . . . 1n1 0n1 . . . 0n1 Ny (nNu ) 01l 01l .. . 0 01(n2)

0 01n W1 = . .. . . . 0 .. . .. . 0

1 01n

0 1 .. .

01n .. . 01n

0 01n . . . . . . . . 0 . 1 01n Ny (n+1)Ny

1 01(n2) .. .. . .

0 . . . 0 1

01(n2) . . . . . . 01(n2)

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Fig. 2. Block diagram of the control system.

the weighting factors (i.e., or ) is varied. In the gure, the poles of the nominal system with the experimental parameters are denoted as X. From Fig. 3(a), it is observed that there are ve nominal poles. Moreover, it is observed that the poles are located within the unit circle. The arrow in Fig. 3(a) shows the movement of the system poles when changes from 0.0001 to 1000. The poles can be separated into two groups. One group is inuenced by the voltage-tracking objective, as is varied; and the other is inuenced by the current-sharing objective, as is varied. As shown in Fig. 3(a), three of the poles are changing as varies. Moreover, they approach the origin when increases but move toward the stability boundary when decreases, yielding a slow responding system. If the weighting factor is varied while is xed, similar conclusion can be drawn for current-sharing performance, as shown in Fig. 3(b). The two poles that are stationary in Fig. 3(a) are now affected and move toward the origin while changes from 0.0001 to 1000. With larger , it leads to better regulated current sharing. Besides the feedback gain K2 , the MPC controller also has a feedforward gain matrix K1 as compared with the state feedback controller. This feedforward gain matrix serves as a phase lead lter to correct the phase error. The bode plot of the control system, with and without K1 , is shown in Fig. 4(a). From the results, it is noted that MPC performs better than the state feedback, as it achieves near-zero phase-tracking performance for a wider bandwidth. To investigate the robustness against system-parameter deviation, various simulation studies have been carried out. With 50% inductance and capacitance deviation, the current difference between the two inverters is less than 1% of the individual inverter output current from the simulation results. The inuence of load variation on the system is shown in Fig. 4(b). When the load changes from to 5 , the magnitude at the critical frequency of 50 Hz remains almost the same. However, a slight increase in phase lag is observed.

C. Hot-Swap Design and Its Robustness Analysis The objective of using a parallel-connected inverters system is to provide greater exibility. The ability to perform hot-swap operation is also highly desirable. When fault occurs, the inverters need to be replaced without shutting down the system that will affect the systems normal operation. Under this situation, the order of the system model changes. To make the controller suitable for the implementation, the controller structure needs to be modied. From (14), it is noted that the rows of K1 = [ K11 K12 K1n ]T are identical, i.e., K11 = K12 , etc. With the common voltage reference, the control signal from the reference has the same impact on the individual inverter. Thus, only one row is needed as the common controller gain, as shown in Fig. 2. For n-inverters system, the original state is dened as = [Vo (kT ) i1 (kT ) in (kT ) Vo (kT T ) X {i1 (kT T ) i2 (kT T )} {in1 (kT T ) (16) in (kT T )}]T . For the controller gain K2 , it can be formulated more compactly by combining the individual inverter currents into a sum. This would result in the modied state vector l = Vo (kT ) X
n

il (kT )
j =1

ij (kT )
n

T ij (kT T ) (17)

Vo (kT T ) il (kT T )
j =1

where l = 1, 2, . . . , n is the index for the inverter and n is the total number of inverters connected in parallel. With this modication, the order of the state vector is always six and is independent of the number of inverters in the system.

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where k1 , k2 , . . . are the original row elements of the K21 vector. As shown in Fig. 2, the required states can be reconstructed with the feedback signals from the system. The output voltage of the inverter system and the current of individual inverters are measured. The individual inverter currents are then combined to form the total current isum . By comparing these three variables with their values at a previous sampling interval, the rst three incremental states in (17) are obtained. These three incremental states are then combined with the three feedback signals at the previous sampling interval to form the new states for each inverter. Whenever an inverter is removed/added to the system, its contribution to the system isum is automatically reected in the state computation (17) for other inverters. The controller will then adjust the control action accordingly based on (14). During operation, the number of inverters could be changed in real time when one inverter becomes faulty. In some situations, when the system power rating is insufcient for the load, additional inverters are added to boost the capacity. For these varying operations, the stability and robustness of the system need to be ensured. The stability for the hot-swap operation could be determined by analyzing the closed-loop pole distribution. Consider the case of two inverter systems. When one inverter is removed from the system, the two poles related to current sharing disappear, as shown in Fig. 5(a). The system remains a stable single-inverter system. In Fig. 5(b), it shows that there are two pairs of duplicated poles related to the current sharing when a new inverter is added to the system. In both situations, the pole positions only change slightly. IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS The proposed approach has been realized with a laboratory setup using a TMS320C31-based DSP board. The DSP board uses a slave processor TMS320P14 to generate the PWM waveform at a switching frequency of 25 kHz. The digital controller and the observer are coded in C program. A sampling period of 40 s has been used in the experiment. Each inverter consists of four insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) IXGH16N60C2D1 connected as an H-bridge. The IGBT is driven by a driver-integrated-circuit IXDD414 with optocoupler HCPL316J. In the setup, two similar inverter circuits are used and connected in parallel to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. The LC low-pass lters of all the inverters are designed to have the same cutoff frequency of 1.8 kHz. The output voltage and inverter currents are measured using Hall-effect voltage (LV25-P) and current sensors (LEM-HEME FB50P) during each interrupt. They are feedback to the DSP after converted to digital signals via 12-b ADCs. As the controller in (18) requires the knowledge of the active number of inverters connected to the UPS, a detection switch is required for each inverter, and their logic signals are read by the digital I/O port of the DSP. For the recording of experimental results, high-voltage differential probes (Tektronix P5200) and current probes with an amplier (Tektronix A6302 and AM503) are used and the waveforms recorded using an oscilloscope (Agilent Inniium 54852A). Fig. 6 shows the performance of the parallel inverters under both static and dynamic loads, namely, the constant resistive

Fig. 3. Closed-loop poles distribution. (a) changes from 0.0001 to 1000. (b) changes from 0.0001 to 1000.

Consequently, a same controller structure can be used for a variable number of inverters, and its complexity will not increase with changes in the inverters number. Let K2l be the l row vector of K2 , and then the corresponding feedback gain for (14) with the simplied state vector (17) can be derived as K2l = k1 k2 k3 k3 kn+2 n kn+3 n1 k2n+1 (18)

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Fig. 4. Bode plots of the system (a) with and without feedforward gain (b) under load variation.

load and the triac load. For the triac load, the ring angles are set at 72 and 252 for positive and negative cycles, respectively. From the results, it is observed that the output voltage is sinusoidal. Moreover, the output current is equally distributed between the inverters regardless of the types of loads. The corresponding total harmonic distortion (THD) and harmonics of the output voltage have also been analyzed, and the results show that the THD for the resistive and triac loads are 1.62% and 2.66%, respectively. Fig. 7 shows the performance of the parallel inverters under the RL load and rectier load. From the results, it is observed that the system performance remains good, and the current is equally shared by the inverters under these loads. Fig. 8(a) shows the response of the system when the load changes from no load to a 50- load. From the results, it

is observed that the load current is equally shared by the inverters even during the switching transient. Fig. 8(b) shows the response of the system when the load changes from the nominal load to no load. Fig. 9 shows the hot-swap operation performance of the investigated system. Fig. 9(a) shows the response when inverter 2 is isolated from the system due to fault condition. It is observed that the inverter 1 takes over the full load immediately, supplying 200% of its nominal load. The quality of the output voltage and current waveforms are very well maintained despite the switching. Fig. 9(b) shows the response when a new inverter is added back into the system. Initially, the load is supplied only by the inverter 1. Then, the inverter 2 is connected to the system. At this moment, the controller starts to generate a control signal for this channel. Correspondingly, the current

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Fig. 6. Experimental results of the system under (50 V/div, 1 A/div, 5 ms/div) (a) 50- load and (b) triac load.

Fig. 5. Poles distribution when the inverter number changes. (a) One inverter removed from the nominal system. (b) Extra inverter added to the system.

of the newly added inverter will start from zero and regulate to the normal operating value under the current-sharing objective. The results show that the inuence on the output voltage and current waveforms is insignicant, and good power quality is achieved. V. C ONCLUSION In this paper, a new approach based on the MPC scheme has been developed to control the parallel-connected inverters of
Fig. 7. Experimental results of the system under (50 V/div, 1 A/div, 5 ms/div) (a) RL load and (b) rectier load.

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an UPS for tight closed-loop control. The proposed approach achieves good performance on both voltage-reference tracking and current-sharing objectives. To verify the proposed scheme, a laboratory prototype has been set up. The experimental results have demonstrated that the system yields good performance under both static- and dynamic-loading conditions. Its performance under nonlinear loads as well as hot-swap operations has also illustrated the robustness of the proposed scheme.

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Fig. 8. Dynamic experimental response (50 V/div, 1 A/div, 10 ms/div). (a) Load changes from null to full. (b) Load changes from full to null.

Fig. 9. Experimental result of output voltage and current waveforms (50 V/div, 1 A/div, 10 ms/div). (a) Inverter 2 is isolated from the system. (b) Inverter 2 is plugged into the system.

LOW AND CAO: MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL OF PARALLEL-CONNECTED INVERTERS FOR UPSs

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Runzi Cao received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2003. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also currently an Electronics Engineer with Fugro Survey Pte. Ltd., Singapore. His main research interests include power electronics and precision motion control.

Kay-Soon Low (M88SM00) received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore, Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. In 1994, he was a Lecturer with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He has served as Consultant to many companies. He is the holder of a number of granted patents on nonlinear circuits and ultrawideband (UWB) systems. His funded projects are in the eld of UWB medical imaging, wireless-sensor networks, motion-control systems, pulse neural networks, and microsatellite systems.