Board 89: Work in Progress: Use of Simscape in an Introductory Power Electronics Course

Abstract

University of the Pacific was a member of an 82-university consortium led by the University of Minnesota (UMN) that was supported by a three-year Department of Energy grant to "revitalize electric power engineering education by state-of-the-art laboratories." Hardware developed at UMN served as the core of a new power electronics course developed in conjunction with this grant. UMN hardware labs were complemented using PSpice for circuit simulation. The PSpice exercises developed at UMN were built around PSpice 9.1 and required custom blocks to simulate components such as ideal transformers with variable turns ratios. Recent offerings of the power electronics course had difficulties with using PSpice for simulation such as: difficulty porting and accessing the PSpice 9.1 custom blocks in the Cadence PSpice software available on campus computers; IT issues resulting in frequent crashes of Cadence that left students with unreliable software access; inability of students to access Cadence remotely. Due to these challenges the author decided to work on replacing PSpice by Simscape for simulations in the Spring 2022 offering of Power Electronics. The transition required significant effort but was successful: all prior PSpice simulations were able to be implemented in Simscape. The paper presents simulation of a buck converter, the dynamic average model of a buck converter, and closed-loop voltage mode control of a buck converter using Simscape and contrasts the features of these simulations against PSpice-based simulations. While there is some published work on use of Simscape in power electronics, the present work relates to UMN labs available in the public domain and is thus of relevance to the 82 universities in the Department of Energy grant consortium.Formal assessment of the effectiveness of Simscape versus PSpice as a pedagogical tool in the context of an introductory power electronics course has not been performed yet. A survey on student preferences for Simscape versus PSpice for simulation showed a definite leaning towards Simscape, with ease of access to Matlab/Simscape software being a strong contributing factor.