CHALLENGE: WEEK6:

1.) Why MATLAB PID auto tuner doesn’t work for a

power converter? Show step wise process for a buck-
boost converter circuit.
Answer: TUNING means-
a. To adjust (an electronic receiver) to a desired frequency.
b. To adjust (an electronic circuit) so as to make it resonant
with a given input signal.
c. To adjust (for example an engine) for maximum usability
or performance.
PID tuning is the process of finding the values of
proportional, integral, and derivative gains of a PID controller
to achieve desired performance and meet design requirements.
There is an option in MATLAB called “auto-tune” which
generally auto-tunes the electronic devices. If we are tuning a
device the graph that it should show should be a linear one.

Suppose for example we are providing a reference of 20 volt

to the SEPIC DC-DC converter and the output that we are
desiring will also be 20 volt. But the output doesn’t follow
this. The output goes on increasing. This value of gain won’t
work. So, now we can go for the “auto-tune” option for the
PID based automotive tuning. This will linearise the graph.
But the graph shows that the plant can’t be linearised because
this is going to have non-linear elements. However, the main
source of nonlinearity is the ubiquitous switching element
which makes all power electronic systems strongly nonlinear
even if all components are assumed to be ideal.
BUCK- BOOST Converter
The buck boost converter is a DC to DC converter. The output
voltage of the DC to DC converter is less than or greater than
the input voltage. The output voltage of the magnitude
depends on the duty cycle. These converters are also known
as the step up and step down transformers.

For the step up mode, the input voltage is less than the output
voltage (Vin < Vout). It shows that the output current is less
than the input current. Hence the buck booster is a step up
mode.
Vin < Vout and Iin > Iout
In the step down mode the input voltage is greater than the
output voltage (Vin > Vout). It follows that the output current
is greater the input current. Hence the buck boost converter is
a step down mode.
Vin > V out and Iin < Iout
The basic buck boost converter is shown below-

The working operation of the DC to DC converter is the

inductor in the input resistance has the unexpected variation in
the input current. If the switch is ON then the inductor feed
the energy from the input and it stores the energy of magnetic
energy. If the switch is closed it discharges the energy. The
output circuit of the capacitor is assumed high (the time
constant of an RC circuit is high on the output stage.)

There are two different types of working principles in the

buck boost converter.
 Buck converter.
 Boost converter.
Buck Converter Working
The following diagram shows the working operation of the
buck converter. In the buck converter first transistor is turned
ON and second transistor is switched OFF due to high square
wave frequency. If the gate terminal of the first transistor is
more than the current pass through the magnetic field,
charging C, and it supplies the load. The D1 is the Schottky
diode and it is turned OFF due to the positive voltage to the
cathode.

Fig: Buck Converter Working

The inductor L is the initial source of current. If the first
transistor is OFF by using the control unit then the current
flow in the buck operation. The magnetic field of the inductor
is collapsed and the back e.m.f is generated collapsing field
turn around the polarity of the voltage across the inductor.
The current flows in the diode D2, the load and the D1 diode
will be turned ON.
The discharge of the inductor L decreases with the help of the
current. During the first transistor is in one state the charge of
the accumulator in the capacitor. The current flows through
the load and during the off period keeping Vout reasonably.
Hence it keeps the minimum ripple amplitude and V out closes
to the value of Vs.
Boost Converter Working
In this converter the first transistor is switched ON continually
and for the second transistor the square wave of high
frequency is applied to the gate terminal. The second
transistor is in conducting when the on state and the input
current flow from the inductor L through the second
transistor. The negative terminal charging up the magnetic
field around the inductor. The D2 diode cannot conduct
because the anode is on the potential ground by highly
conducting the second transistor.

By charging the capacitor C the load is applied to the entire

circuit in the ON State and it can construct earlier oscillator
cycles. During the ON period the capacitor C can discharge
regularly and the amount of high ripple frequency on the
output voltage. The approximate potential difference is given
by the equation below.
VS + VL

During the OFF period of second transistor the inductor L is

charged and the capacitor C is discharged. The inductor L can
produce the back e.m.f and the values are depending up on the
rate of change of current of the second transistor switch. The
amount of inductance the coil can occupy. Hence the back
e.m.f can produce any different voltage through a wide range
and determined by the design of the circuit. Hence the polarity
of voltage across the inductor L has reversed now.
The input voltage gives the output voltage and atleast equal to
or higher than the input voltage. The diode D2 is in forward
biased and the current applied to the load current and it
recharges the capacitors to VS + VL and it is ready for the
second transistor.
Modes Of Buck Boost Converters
There are two different types of modes in the buck boost
converter. The following are the two different types of buck
boost converters.
 Continuous conduction mode.
 Discontinuous conduction mode.
Continuous Conduction Mode

In the continuous conduction mode the current from end to

end of inductor never goes to zero. Hence the inductor
partially discharges earlier than the switching cycle.
Discontinuous Conduction Mode

In this mode the current through the inductor goes to zero.

Hence the inductor will totally discharge at the end of
switching cycles.

2. Explain the importance of ADC and DAC blocks in

closed loop control of power converter.

Answer: A closed-loop control system generally consists of

three elements: the controller, the input for the feedback
signal (an ADC), and an output actuator (a DAC). The ADC
senses and feeds back important information to the controller.
Based on that feedback information, the controller decides to
adjust a manipulated variable. It sends a signal to the DAC
actuator that processes a controlled variable output. The speed
and accuracy of the ADC and DAC are critical in this closed
loop. If the control system cannot react to a fault condition
fast enough, it could allow a catastrophic system failure.

IMPORTANCE OF ADC
If an analog input is sent to a computer, an analog-to-digital
converter (ADC) is required. This device can take an analog
signal, such as an electrical current, and digitize it into a
binary format that the computer can understand. A common
use for an ADC is to convert analog video to a digital format.
An ADC converts a continuous-time and continuous-
amplitude analog signal to a discrete-time and discrete-
amplitude digital signal. The conversion involves quantization
of the input, so it necessarily introduces a small amount of
error or noise. Furthermore, instead of continuously
performing the conversion, an ADC does the conversion
periodically, sampling the input, limiting the allowable
bandwidth of the input signal.
The performance of an ADC is primarily characterized by its
bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The bandwidth of
an ADC is characterized primarily by its sampling rate. The
SNR of an ADC is influenced by many factors, including the
resolution, linearity and accuracy (how well the quantization
levels match the true analog signal), aliasing and jitter. The
SNR of an ADC is often summarized in terms of its effective
number of bits (ENOB), the number of bits of each measure it
returns that are on average not noise. An ideal ADC has an
ENOB equal to its resolution. ADCs are chosen to match the
bandwidth and required SNR of the signal to be digitized. If
an ADC operates at a sampling rate greater than twice the
bandwidth of the signal, then per the Nyquist–Shannon
sampling theorem, perfect reconstruction is possible. The
presence of quantization error limits the SNR of even an ideal
ADC. However, if the SNR of the ADC exceeds that of the
input signal, its effects may be neglected resulting in an
essentially perfect digital representation of the analog input
signal.
Resolution
Fig. 1. An 8-level ADC coding scheme.
The resolution of the converter indicates the number of
discrete values it can produce over the range of analog values.
The resolution determines the magnitude of the quantization
error and therefore determines the maximum possible average
signal-to-noise ratio for an ideal ADC without the use of
oversampling. The values are usually stored electronically in
binary form, so the resolution is usually expressed as the
audio bit depth. In consequence, the number of discrete values
available is assumed to be a power of two. For example, an
ADC with a resolution of 8 bits can encode an analog input to
one in 256 different levels (28 = 256). The values can
represent the ranges from 0 to 255 (i.e. unsigned integer) or
from −128 to 127 (i.e. signed integer), depending on the
application.
Resolution can also be defined electrically, and expressed in
volts. The change in voltage required to guarantee a change in
the output code level is called the least significant bit (LSB)
voltage. The resolution Q of the ADC is equal to the LSB
voltage.
Quantization error
Analog to digital conversion as shown with fig. 1 and fig. 2.
Quantization error is introduced by quantization in an ideal
ADC. It is a rounding error between the analog input voltage
to the ADC and the output digitized value. The error is
nonlinear and signal-dependent. In an ideal ADC, where the
quantization error is uniformly distributed between −1/2 LSB
and +1/2 LSB, and the signal has a uniform distribution
covering all quantization levels, the Signal-to-quantization-
noise ratio (SQNR) is given by
Where Q is the number of quantization bits. For
example, for a 16-bit ADC, the quantization error is
96.3 dB below the maximum level.
Quantization error is distributed from DC to the Nyquist
frequency, consequently if part of the ADC's bandwidth is not
used, as is the case with oversampling, some of the
quantization error will occur out-of-band, effectively
improving the SQNR for the bandwidth in use. In an
oversampled system, noise shaping can be used to further
increase SQNR by forcing more quantization error out of
band.
Dither
In ADCs, performance can usually be improved using dither.
This is a very small amount of random noise (e.g. white
noise), which is added to the input before conversion. Its
effect is to randomize the state of the LSB based on the signal.
Rather than the signal simply getting cut off altogether at low
levels, it extends the effective range of signals that the ADC
can convert, at the expense of a slight increase in noise. Note
that dither can only increase the resolution of a sampler. It
cannot improve the linearity, and thus accuracy does not
necessarily improve.
Quantization distortion in an audio signal of very low level
with respect to the bit depth of the ADC is correlated with the
signal and sounds distorted and unpleasant. With dithering,
the distortion is transformed into noise. The undistorted signal
may be recovered accurately by averaging over time.
Dithering is also used in integrating systems such as
electricity meters. Since the values are added together, the
dithering produces results that are more exact than the LSB of
the analog-to-digital converter.
Dither is often applied when quantizing photographic images
to a fewer number of bits per pixel—the image becomes
noisier but to the eye looks far more realistic than the
quantized image, which otherwise becomes banded. This
analogous process may help to visualize the effect of dither on
an analog audio signal that is converted to digital.
Accuracy
An ADC has several sources of errors. Quantization error and
(assuming the ADC is intended to be linear) non-linearity are
intrinsic to any analog-to-digital conversion. These errors are
measured in a unit called the least significant bit (LSB). In the
above example of an eight-bit ADC, an error of one LSB is
1/256 of the full signal range, or about 0.4%.
Nonlinearity
All ADCs suffer from nonlinearity errors caused by their
physical imperfections, causing their output to deviate from a
linear function (or some other function, in the case of a
deliberately nonlinear ADC) of their input. These errors can
sometimes be mitigated by calibration, or prevented by
testing. Important parameters for linearity are integral
nonlinearity and differential nonlinearity. These nonlinearities
introduce distortion that can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio
performance of the ADC and thus reduce its effective
resolution.
Jitter
When digitizing a sine wave , the use of a non-ideal sampling
clock will result in some uncertainty in when samples are
recorded. Provided that the actual sampling time uncertainty
due to clock jitter is , the error caused by this phenomenon
can be estimated as . This will result in additional recorded
noise that will reduce the effective number of bits (ENOB)
below that predicted by quantization error alone. The error is
zero for DC, small at low frequencies, but significant with
signals of high amplitude and high frequency. The effect of
jitter on performance can be compared to quantization error:
where q is the number of ADC bit.
IMPORTANCE OF DACs:
A DAC converts an abstract finite-precision number (usually
a fixed-point binary number) into a physical quantity (e.g., a
voltage or a pressure). In particular, DACs are often used to
convert finite-precision time series data to a continually
varying physical signal.
It is more efficient and substantially more accurate to do
signal processing in the digital domain (i.e. the language used
by computers). Ultimately though, things that interact directly
with humans do so in the analog domain (i.e. humans hear
sound, not ones and zeros). Therefore, the purpose of a DAC
is to take digital domain signal processing results and convert
them into a form that is directly or indirectly amenable to
humans.
Sound is one example. Light another.
The above being said, one must be careful when
characterizing what is a DAC.
When most engineers think of a DAC, they think of a
converter that takes a digital word (i.e. 10 bits) and converts
directly in one step to an analog voltage. That is only one
example and only for certain applications.
Another type of DAC is a pulse width modulator (PWM). A
PWM takes a digital word, again perhaps 10 bits, and
generates a digital pulse with variable pulse width. When this
signal is passed through a filter, the result will be purely
analogue. Such a case happens in modern speaker drivers
where the speaker itself can be part of the filtering. In fact,
your ear also helps with the conversion since human hearing
extends up to about 20 KHz whereas the digital signalling
might be at several megahertz.
While not a part of the question, the DAC counterpart, the
Analog to Digital converter (ADC) provides the same purpose
although from the signal input side, not output. In the case of
audio, an ADC would interface to a microphone. All
processing would happen in the digital domain, and then the
result sent to a DAC which then drives a speaker.

3.) Prepare an organizational chart of people working at

electric powertrain manufacturing company.