Design and Testing of A Power Electronic Synthetic Inductor

In many applications, inductors are often replaced with circuits, typically based upon operational amplifiers, which emulate an inductance for reasons of package size or to closer approximate the desired ideal behavior. A power electronic synthetic inductor offers an alternative circuit which can emulate an inductor with relatively low power consumption, as well as provide a flexible circuit topology that is not limited to inductor behavior at all times. In this paper a power electronic synthetic inductor topology and control system is developed. A prototype synthetic inductor was built and tested, and its operation was explored and compared with an analog operational-amplifier-based synthetic inductor. The results show that the power electronics synthetic inductor has a higher quality factor as well as much lower power consumption than the operational-amplifier-based synthetic inductor.