Ultra-High-Bandwidth Power Amplifiers: A Technology Overview and Future Prospects

Testing of power electronic converters can advantageously be carried out in power-hardware-in-the-loop (P-HIL) environments that emulate the behavior of power grids, electric motors, etc. The interface between the model and the device under test requires a power amplifier whose bandwidth ultimately limits the accuracy of the emulation. Hence, there is a need for general-purpose AC power amplifiers with ultra-high power bandwidth. This paper first provides a comprehensive review of amplifier concepts proposed over the past decades, i.e., linear power amplifiers, switch-mode amplifiers, including advanced variants such as multilevel (parallel-interleaving) and multicell (series-interleaving) topologies, as well as hybrid approaches that, e.g., combine analog and switch-mode stages. Based on this review, the two key concepts (parallel-interleaving of bridge-legs and cascading of converter cells) that facilitate high efficiency and ultra-high power bandwidth are identified and discussed, covering also suitable isolated mains interfaces and control considerations. Finally, we present a three-phase amplifier system that uses six cascaded converter cells per phase to realize an effective switching frequency of 3.6MHz. The prototype thus achieves a measured power bandwidth of 100kHz at the nominal phase output voltage of 230Vrms, and an output power of up to 10kW per phase.