A fast and precise simulation method for performance screening for high power converter designs

For high power converter designs, a performance screening with hundreds or thousands of configuration combinations and operation points is typically required. Standard time-domain based circuit simulators are not efficient for such screening works because of the long computation time. In this paper, a modeling and simulation methodology is presented, which is ultra-fast compared to time-domain based simulators. The paper presents a generalized method to calculate the steady-state load response, even for complicated loads like machines. Afterwards, a powerful simulation program based on MATLAB m-files is introduced, which calculates the voltage / current waveforms, device power loss and thermal stress jointly. Due to the flexible structure, multiple multilevel topologies, modulation schemes, load types and devices can be configured for the performance screening without major modifications. The proposed method reaches the same steady-state accuracy as circuit simulators in about a factor of thousand reduced computation time. Because of these features, the methodology and the program developed in this paper are perfect for a wide-range performance screenings for high power converter designs.