Open AccessSelf‐organising technique for carrier synchronisation and phase offset distribution in modular, fault‐tolerant converters
Author(s) -
Broadmeadow Mark A. H.,
Sands Kenneth D.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the journal of engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2051-3305
DOI - 10.1049/joe.2018.8057
Subject(s) - converters , offset (computer science) , computer science , modular design , pulse width modulation , electronic engineering , fault tolerance , field programmable gate array , waveform , duplex (building) , electrical engineering , engineering , voltage , computer hardware , telecommunications , radar , distributed computing , dna , biology , genetics , programming language , operating system
Carrier interleaved pulse width modulated modular multilevel converters provide multiple benefits including increased effective switching frequency, switching frequency harmonic elimination, and reduced filter requirements. For converters comprising high numbers of switching modules, control is often distributed across multiple controllers, making carrier‐phase synchronisation challenging. This paper presents a technique for carrier‐phase synchronisation and phase offset distribution for controllers in a ring network comprising duplex serial links. The proposed method is self‐organising, with equal phase offset automatically achieved across connected nodes. A key advantage of the proposed technique is capacity to enable fault tolerance, through automatic phase offset redistribution in the case of switching modules being removed from the system. An experimental prototype is implemented and evaluated using three FPGA nodes connected via 6.25 Gbps full‐duplex fibre‐optic links, with phase offset accuracy to within 0.1 degrees demonstrated for 25 kHz pulse width modulation.