Transient Simulation for Design of Power Electronics Systems

For optimizing a power electronics system, a number of factors, such as overvoltage, overcurrent and efficiency, need to be analyzed. We developed a transient simulation program for the design of power electronics system based on XTAP (eXpndable Transient Analysis Program). The developed program can analyze the waveform and efficiency simultaneously it can calculate the voltage and current of all components of power electronics system. In this paper, we first discuss semiconductor device models for use in the simulation program. These models can simulate switching dynamics with high accuracy. Next, we report the result of comparison between measurement and simulation about a photovoltaic inverter. As a result, it was proved that the simulation waveform agreed with the measurement waveform with high accuracy and the error of simulated efficiency is 0.35 point at rated output power. On the basis of the above result, we verified accuracy of the developed program. We took chopper gate resistance as a parameter to be optimized by using the developed program, and we indicated that the efficiency of this inverter could be maximized by performing parametric analysis. We can perform a comprehensive and accurate parametric analysis of a power electronics system by using the developed program.