Abstract

The use of power converters has considerably grown up, in part, because refined control strategies have been recently proposed, including nonlinear schemes such as predictive control. This approach is used in this work considering a variable grid frequency environment in order to get an appropriate response for a wide ac mains frequency range. Indeed, in order to achieve appropriate, both dynamic and static, responses for all operating frequencies, the number of samples per period is kept constant and independent of the ac mains frequency. This allows a fixed resolution of the sensed voltages and/or currents, which is preferable if high-performance digital control schemes are required. However, imposing a constant number of samples per period requires a variable sampling time in systems that feature variable ac mains frequency. On the other hand, predictive control has been developed and well documented just for a constant sampling frequency. This work presents how to extend the predictive control algorithms for variable sampling time allowing high-performance waveforms and wider ac mains frequency range. Simulated and experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed control strategy which corroborates the mathematical and model analysis.