Control of Power Electronics through a Photonic Bus: Feasibility and Prospects

Abstract

The ubiquitous diffusion of Power Electronic Converters (PECs) in many fields of application including traction and energy conversion suggests the possibility of new and better integration of advanced power conversion and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services. This work investigates the possible advancements in the use of optical communication links made of plastic optical fibers for control of PECs. The optical communication link connects the switching control to the converter control, following the line of separation between the expertise of power electronic and control engineers. Control wise, a PEC is a black box compatible with any off-board controller, now immune from the Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) produced by the power switches. The redundant optical link is ready for the high switching and sampling frequencies, made possible by relying on SiC power semiconductor devices (100+ kHz). Distributed control of multiple PEC units and advanced telemetry for diagnostics and prognostics are targeted. A proof-of-concept demonstrator is presented and tested. Moreover, the possible evolution towards a power electronic cloud with remote management and orchestration is described.

Minimization of Network Induced Jitter Impact on FPGA-Based Control Systems for Power Electronics through Forward Error Correction

“…A latency of 910 ns and of 200 ns were measured in the case of RS and Hamming code techniques, respectively. Both these results were comparable or even better than those presented in the state-of-the-art [16]. It is worth noting that the RS solution had better performances in terms of BER regardless of the channel conditions.…”

“…For systems with particular requirements in terms of extremely wide control bandwidth or minimal latencies, further techniques for the characterization and compensation of the network latencies are available from modern control theory [28]. However, it is worth noting that by comparing these results with others achieved by similar works [16], the measured latency, even in the case of the RS code, was significantly lower. Hence, these results indicate a viable solution in this kind of application.…”

“…Only recently, the availability of low cost, high density Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) has also allowed the use of these techniques in the filed of machine drives. In [16], a communication protocol for optical fibers-based distributed power electronic systems is developed. However, in [13,14,16] a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the introduction of digital communication to the control of distributed drive applications is still not fully examined.…”

“…In [16], a communication protocol for optical fibers-based distributed power electronic systems is developed. However, in [13,14,16] a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the introduction of digital communication to the control of distributed drive applications is still not fully examined. In particular, how FEC techniques can reduce the vulnerability of a control system to network-related jitter is still an open issue.…”