Experimental Demonstration of Peak and Valley Current Control

Abstract

Average Current Control (AAC) or Conductance Control has been widely used in the European space sector for the last three decades. Although very common in DC/DC converters inside Power Conditioning and Distribution Units (PCDU), until recently no attempt was made to characterize and understand the effects of the sampling that occurs when the controlled current is compared to the sawtooth signal. Indeed, similar sampling phenomena exist with the widespread Peak Current Control scheme (PCC) and have been well documented in the literature. Recently, it has been demonstrated that not only the same sampling effects exist for ACC, but that ACC with asymmetrical sawtooth can be seen as being the same control scheme as PCC with its compensation ramp, the sole difference being the slope of the controlled current with respect to the sawtooth slope. In addition, a new scheme called Peak and Valley Current Control (PVCC) has been proposed, with the observation that ACC with symmetrical sawtooth is also a subset of PVCC. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparison between PCC and PVCC, to highlight the similarities between those schemes and ACC, and to verify experimentally the above-mentioned findings.