Efficient steady-state simulation of a power electronic circuit by parallel processing

It is often necessary to get steady-state waveforms of a power electronic circuit for its design or analysis. Direct steady-state analysis techniques have been researched for efficient simulation. The shooting method is one of these and it is often utilized. It is known that its multiple type form is numerically more stable than the usual single type one. Furthermore it is suitable for parallel processing and it is possible to reduce its computation time. Today parallel computing systems, or PC cluster systems which are based on PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) or MPI (Message Passing Interface), are easily available. This paper proposes an efficient steady-state simulation technique based on the multiple shooting method for a power electronic circuit by parallel processing. First the principle is investigated and made clear how it works. Then it is extended to be applicable to the envelope following analysis for much more efficient simulation by combining the principles. Finally the developed method can utilize both advantages of the two principles. It takes a long CPU time to get steady-state solution even by the single shooting method. By applying the single shooting envelope following technique, it is reduced to 1/10 for an example case. By applying the proposed multiple shooting EF technique, it is reduced about to 1/30 with 10 CPUs. This shows effectiveness of the method.