Analysis and Control of Direct Voltage Regulated Active DC-Link Capacitance Reduction Circuit

The paper focuses on control analysis and operational issues of a recently proposed direct voltage regulated active capacitance reduction circuit, consisting of a small auxiliary capacitance interfaced to dc link by bidirectional DC-DC converter. The aim of such a system is replacing the bulk dc bus capacitor without escalating the ripple. While the hardware of the system under study is similar to some of the proposed active capacitance reduction solutions, the control structure is quite different. The primary goal of the controller is direct regulation of dc-link voltage rather than dc-link current, performed by most of existing solutions, thus avoiding the use of invasive dc-link current measurement/s. It is revealed that such an active capacitance reduction circuitry may be perceived as output-voltage regulated wide-input-range converter feeding a bidirectional power load. Such an arrangement was neither mentioned nor analyzed in the literature by far, requiring nontrivial and challenging control design. A dual-loop voltage-current arrangement widely used in typical power supplies is proposed to control the active capacitance reduction circuitry. It is shown that the control structure is sufficient to yield satisfactory performance even though the system possesses a slow unstable mode when absorbing power from the dc link. The revealed findings are fully supported by simulations and experimental results.