Reduction of switching losses and increase in efficiency of power converters using predictive control

To achieve high efficiency without performance deterioration is a desired objective in power conversion. This work presents a novel method to reduce switching losses, based on predictive control, which can be applied to a wide variety of switched-mode power converters. The idea is to predict switching losses for every valid switching state of the converter if applied during the next sampling time and then select the optimum state based on the evaluation of a quality function. The proposed strategy was experimentally tested on a matrix converter and induction machine setup, reducing energy losses, thus increasing efficiency, without affecting the performance of the drive.