A heuristic approach to robust control design for boost power converters with harmonic reduction

This paper presents an approach to the design of an output voltage regulator for a boost converter operating in continuous conduction mode. This approach relies on 'robust control' design techniques, but uses some heuristic rules for defining the controller design procedure instead of being based on a precise definition of model uncertainties. Design algorithms of H-infinity robust controllers are cast in a 'black-box' framework, leaving some free design parameters to be tuned by the user. The resulting controller attenuates input-output transmission (low audio-susceptibility), has decentralised structure and uses only local information, guaranteeing stability and the desired closed-loop dynamic response. The main contribution of the tuning rules is that the controller parameters can be obtained using one design parameter which reflects the trade-off between stability robustness and time domain performance. Various aspects of the design, including the associated practical problems and the proposed solutions, are detailed. Simulation results on a boost converter, using a poorly regulated voltage source, are presented to assess the performance of our approach.