This paper presents an improved gate drive circuit for high power GTO thyristors. The energy-storage/transfer characteristics of an air-core reactor and the fast switching characteristics of FET are employed to make a high gate current of sharp pulse form. The power loss in the gate drive circuit is reduced by using the low resistance and the hysteresis comparator to detect and control the steady on-gate current. The proposed gate drive circuit is analyzed and its usefulness is confirmed by experiments.

The digitally controlled dc-dc converter has the advantage of high reliability, high controllability and high flexibility. A new digital controller for the PWM and/or PFM controlled switching dc-dc converters is presented, which is versatile in general use such as the switching frequency from 20 kHz to 70 kHz, the hard-switching and soft-switching and so forth. As an example, we apply this controller to half-bridge type series resonant dc-dc converter with auxiliary switches, in which both PWM and PFM control modes are employed, and the output characteristics of the converter are discussed. As a result, the relationships among circuit parameters of the proposed digital controller, switching frequency of the dc-dc converter, oscillation frequency of the VCO as analog to digital signal converter are defined.

Recently, the clean electric power generation systems have been developed aggressively to exploit the clean energy resources such as solar array, fuel cell and so forth. In this case, the multiple-input dc-dc converter is useful to combine the multiple input power sources and to take the appropriate amount of power from these multiple input power sources, in which their voltage levels and/or their power capacities are different. We have proposed a novel multiple-input dc-dc converter, in which the distinctive feature is its simpler circuit configuration in comparison with that in parallel with the multiple converters. This paper presents two control methods for the two-input dc-dc converter. In the first control method, the on-time of one switch is determined only by the input current and that of another one is controlled by both of the input current and the output voltage. On the other hand, in the second control method, though the on-time of one switch is determined only by the input current as well as in the first control method, the on-time of the another switch is controlled only by the output voltage. The comparative analysis of the steady-state and dynamic characteristics of the two-input dc-dc converter using two control methods are performed theoretically and experimentally. As a result, it is revealed that the first control method is superior to the second one in the steady-state and dynamic performances.

The characteristics of voltage-resonant dc-dc converters have already been analyzed and described. However, in the conventional analysis, the inductance of the reactor is assumed to be infinity and the loss resistance of the power circuit is not taken into account. Also, in some cases, the averaging method is applied to analyze the resonant dc-dc converters as well as the pwm dc-dc converters. Consequently, the results from conventional analysis are not entirely in agreement with the experimental ones. This paper presents a general design-oriented analysis of the buck-boost type voltage-resonant dc-dc converter in the continuous and discontinuous modes of the reactor current. In this analysis, the loss resistance in each part of the power circuit, the inductance of the reactor, the effective value (not mean value) of the power loss, and the energy-balance among the input, output and internal-loss powers are taken into account. As a result, the behavior and characteristics of the buck-boost type voltage-resonant dc-dc converter are fully explained. It is also revealed that there is a useful mode in the discontinuous reactor current region, in which the output voltage can be regulated sufficiently for the load change from no load to full load and for the relatively large change of the input voltage, and then the change in the switching frequency can be kept relatively small.

This paper presents the analysis of a new multi-oscillated current resonant type DC-DC converter. Current resonant converters have several remarkable features such as high efficiency, small size, low cost and low noise, and are frequently employed in many portable electronic systems such as personal computers, cellular phones and flat panel displays. The current resonant type converter generally employs pulse frequency modulation for constant voltage control in the output. For this reason, the magnetizing current through the converter not only causes a power loss under a light load, but also a loss during stand-by. Therefore, this type of converter has a problem in that the required smaller size cannot be achieved, because an auxiliary source is necessary for stand-by. In order to solve these problems, a new current resonant type power supply is proposed in which two driving methods are employed. In these driving methods, one MOSFET as a main switch is driven by an auxiliary winding of the transformer and another MOSFET as a main switch is driven by the driving IC with a low withstand voltage. Good agreement of the observed and simulated waveforms was confirmed. In addition, eight distinct states and four distinct operating modes, which compose of the sequence of states, were clarified by experimental and simulated analysis.

This paper presents the novel method not only to suppress the input current harmonics but also to realize the low frequency output voltage ripple using the multiple-input ac-dc converter, which is considered from viewpoints of the relatively small power application and simple circuit configuration. The operation principle and control strategy of the proposed circuit are discussed. As a result, it is clarified that the new circuit has excellent performance characteristics such as high power factor over 0.99, low total harmonic current distortion factor less than 9.2% and low output voltage ripple of 40 mV.

A digitally controlled dc-dc power converter is useful to dc power supply systems for telecommunications and data communications systems that require high reliability and high performance. This paper presents a design criterion and output characteristics of 1 MHz high-speed digitally controlled dc-dc converter using a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) as an analog to digital signal converter in the digital control circuit. As a result, it is revealed theoretically and experimentally that the proposed 1 MHz high-speed digitally controlled dc-dc converter has excellent static and dynamic characteristics. The adjustability of output voltage is less than 10 mV and there is no steady-state error within the integral controlled regulation range. Also, the overshoot is suppressed enough within 0.1 V and the transient time is very short.

It is often observed that the operation of the digitally controlled dc-dc power converter becomes unstable when the relatively large integral coefficient is used to extend the regulation range of the output voltage to handle variations in the input voltage and load. This paper presents a novel digital controller with static model reference for switching dc-dc power converters to improve the performance characteristics and discusses its design-oriented analysis in the steady-state characteristics. It is clarified theoretically and experimentally that using the static model reference, the wide regulation range of the output voltage to handle variations in the input voltage and load current can be achieved with the appropriate small integral coefficient in the digital P-I-D controller. Therefore, since the integral coefficient is selected to cover the maximum instantaneous variation value of the static reference model, the integral coefficient is small and the operation is always stable.

This paper presents a partially resonant active filter based on a digital PWM control circuit with a DSP that can improve the power factor and input current harmonic distortion factor of distributed power supply systems in communications buildings. The steady-state and dynamic characteristics of this active filter are analyzed experimentally and the relationship between the control variables of digital control circuit with the DSP and performance characteristics such as regulation of the output voltage, input power factor, input current harmonic distortion factor, boundaries of stabilities and transient response are defined. Using the partially resonant circuit, the efficiency is over 91%, which is 0.9 point higher than that of non-resonant circuit and the high frequency switching noise is suppressed. Furthermore, the digital control strategy with the DSP proposed in this paper can realize the superior transient response of input current and output voltage for the step change of load, the power factor over 0.99 and total harmonic distortion factor less than 1.1%.

Wind power generation occupies an important position as a new non-fossil energy in recent years, and the plant scale has been rapidly expanding as wind-farm. Since they are often built in topographically inconvenient places, the remote monitoring system has been required. Ethernet had been said to be unsuitable to the industrial network, it is one of the strong options because of its low cost and easiness to apply. In this case, it is important to secure the throughput enough for updating the data of numerous wind turbines within a fixed time. In order to achieve this, we adopted User Datagram Protocol/Internet Protocol (UDP/IP) and the multi-thread method to make the overhead of software small as possible. This paper presents the scheme of powerful network using Ethernet with multi-thread and multi-cast. The relation between the number of threads and total throughputs of network is clarified. The design procedure to derive the optimum number of threads is shown. And it is demonstrated that this scheme provide the local network of wind-farm with sufficient performance.