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Operation under light-load conditions is a general issue when developing power converters as it can lead to system instability and/or decreased performance. This topic is particularly important for resonant converters as their efficiency significantly reduces when their operation point is set outside their resonant conditions. Considering the importance of efficiency for power converter reliability, environmental impacts, and regulation concerns, a major effort to improve the operation under light-load conditions is justified. Domestic induction heating is an application where variable loads and output power requirements imply operation under a wide range of conditions, including long-term light-load operation. The aim of this paper is to propose an improved control scheme for series resonant multiinverters, which are a cost-effective topology for supplying multiple inductive loads, based on discontinuous-mode operation. Two different control strategies are proposed: regenerative control and direct conduction control. An analytical study is performed, and the main simulation results are presented. An experimental series resonant multiinverter prototype is used to validate the simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The design of new power-converter solutions optimized for specific applications requires, at a certain step, the design and implementation of several prototypes in order to verify the converter operation. This is a time-consuming task which also involves a significant economical cost. The aim of this paper is to present a versatile power electronics architecture which provides a tool to make the implementation and evaluation of new power converters straightforward. The adopted platform includes a versatile control architecture and a modular power electronics hardware solution. The control architecture is a field-programmable-gate-array-based system-on-programmable-chip solution which combines the advantages of the processor-firmware versatility and the effectiveness of ad hoc paralleled digital hardware. Moreover, the modular power electronics hardware provides a fast method to reconfigure the power-converter topology. The architecture proposed in this paper has been applied to the development of power converters for domestic induction heating, although it can be extended to other applications with similar requirements. A complete development test bench has been carried out, and some experimental results are shown in order to verify the proper system operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation technique applied to a series-resonant multiple-output inverter for new multi-inductor domestic induction heating platforms. The control of the topology is based on a system-on-programmable chip (SoPC) solution, which combines the MicroBlaze embedded soft-core processor and a customized peripheral that generates the power converter control signals. The firmware is written in C, and the customized peripheral is described using a hardware description language. Simulating the whole system using digital or mixed-signal simulation tools is a very time-consuming task due to the embedded processor model complexity, and additionally, it does not support tracing C instructions. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time simulation test bench. The embedded processor core, peripherals, and the power converter model are all implemented into the same field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Using the hardware and software debugging tools supplied by the FPGA vendor, currents and voltages of the power converter model are monitored, and firmware C instructions are traced while running on the embedded processor core. Then, it is presented a design flow that is proven to be an effective and low-cost solution to verify the functionality of the customized peripheral and to implement a platform to perform firmware verification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]