Software simulation integration in enhancing engineering design in power conversion studies

Abstract

PSIM and MATLAB are the most commonly used software packages available for simulation of power electronic systems. The paper presents the simulation of power converters using a SimCoupler Module in MATLAB which provides the link between PSIM and MATLAB/Simulink for Software Simulation Integration (SSI) work. The power electronic system is implemented in PSIM for representing the system model, while the control circuit is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink in a complementary way, so significantly shortening the time to set up and simulate a system which includes electronic circuits. The important step in SSI technique is the time synchronization of the two independent software platforms that is used in this study PSIM and MATLAB/ Simulink. The availability of personal computers with fast microprocessors and ample RAM size makes SSI technique possible. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how to use the Simcoupler Module for a three-phase, multilevel inverter using model predictive strategy with resistive-inductive load (RL-Load). The paper explains the theoretical approach of the system model and then the simulation results are given in order to show the effectiveness of the system in the SSI arena. The output currents and DC-link capacitor voltages are sampled and predicted for the next sampling time for each valid switching state of the inverter. The error between the predicted and reference current values and also the error between the capacitor voltages with respect to the reference value are obtained to minimize the cost function by choosing the appropriate state's switching signals and then applied the control signals to the switches embedded in the converter under study. The co-simulation results show that the proposed control achieves high performance. As a result, applying SSI tools by using SimCoupler enhances the engineering design efficiency in power conversion studies.