Comparative Study of Discrete PI and PR Controls for Single-Phase UPS Inverter

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study of discrete proportional integral (PI) and proportional resonant (PR) current control for single-phase uninterruptible power supply (UPS) inverters. There is an increasing requirement for current and voltage-controlled UPS inverters with very low or zero steady-state error, improved transient response and lower total harmonic distortion (THD). The most promising type of current regulator for single-phase inverters is PR control because it can introduce an infinite gain at a selected resonance frequency such as the fundamental frequency to eliminate the steady-state error, which cannot be achieved by well-known proportional integral (PI) control. Note that PI control has limitations in terms of the steady-state magnitude and phase errors. In addition, PI control also has limited harmonic rejection capability, unlike the PR control, also can compensate for low-order harmonics. Imperfections in the current and voltage control scheme results in higher harmonic distortion of the output current and voltage. In this paper, performance of PR control parameters ($K_{p}$ , $K_{i}$ , and $\omega _{c}$ ) and filter parameters ($L_{f}$ and $C_{f}$ ) are optimally tuned to obtain a very low THD current with reduced output voltage ripple and steady-state error. The analysis, design and implementation of both PI and PR current control in single-phase UPS inverter applications through simulations and experiments are also presented in this paper. The performance of both of these control schemes are analyzed in terms of steady-state response, transient response, and level of current harmonics.

Keywords

• Proportional-integral (PI) control
• proportional-resonant (PR) control
• linear control
• non-linear control
• uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
• single-phase inverter