Design of a continuous signal generator based on sliding mode control of three-phase AC-DC power converters

In recent years, hundreds of technical papers have been published which describe the use of sliding mode control (SMC) techniques for power electronic equipment and electrical drives. SMC with discontinuous control actions has the potential to circumvent parameter variation effects with low implementation complexity. The problem of controlling time-varying DC loads has been studied in literature if three-phase input voltage sources are available. The conventional approach implies the design of a three-phase AC/DC converter with a constant output voltage. Then, an additional DC/DC converter is utilized as an additional stage in the output of the converter to generate the required voltage for the load. A controllable AC/DC converter is always used to have a high quality of the consumed power. The aim of this study is to design a controlled continuous signal generator based on the sliding mode control of a three-phase AC-DC power converter, which yields the production of continuous variations of the output DC voltage. A sliding mode current tracking system is designed with reference phase currents proportional to the source voltage. The proportionality time-varying gain is selected such that the output voltage is equal to the desired time function. The proposed new topology also offers the capability to get rid of the additional DC/DC power converter and produces the desired time-varying control function in the output of AC/DC power converter. The effectiveness of the proposed control design is demonstrated through a wide range of MATLAB/Simulink simulations.