Design of Control Power Supply Using Ultracapacitor

Abstract

High power converters are conventionally used in drive applications. Riding through a short term power supply glitch is becoming an important requirement in these power converters. The power converter uses a large number of control circuit boards for its operation. The control power supply need to ensure that any glitch in the grid side does not affect any of these control circuit boards. A power supply failure of these control boards results in shut down of the entire system. The project proposes a ride through system developed to overcome voltage sags and short duration outages at the power supply terminals of the control cards for these converters. A 13.5 V buck-boost converter has been designed to be used along with a stack of ultracapacitors to achieve the same. A micro-controller based digital control platform is implemented to achieve the control objective. The design of the ultracapacitor stack and the buck-boost converter is described and the performance of the experimental set-up is evaluated.