A computer aided method for determining operating-mode boundaries in power electronic circuits

Operating mode analysis is an essential problem in analyzing and designing power electronic circuits. In particular it is often required to find regions of circuit parameters such that a given power circuit takes a certain operating mode. This paper discusses a computer aided method for determining the operating-mode boundaries in general power electronic circuits. The proposed method for obtaining the operating-mode boundaries is basically to trace solution curves of the nonlinear algebraic equations which satisfy the boundary conditions among the operating modes. The concept of the homotopy continuation method is applied to trace the solution curves. It is shown through numerical examples that the proposed method makes it possible to determine the operating mode boundaries efficiently and accurately.