Closed loop tests for performance evaluations of controlled DC-DC switching converters

An experimental performance-evaluation of controlled plants is a primary task for checking the validity of the controller design, especially in case of nonlinear plants, such as switching DC/DC converters. This paper presents a simple and automatic experimental method to estimate all circle-based design specifications (gain and phase margin, sensitivity and closed-loop bandwidth). This procedure employs the sinusoidal auto tune variation (SATV) method to guarantee a high accuracy and robustness with respect to measurement noise. An application to a boost converter is proposed.