Event-driven simulation of power electronics in the complementarity systems framework

A new event-driven method is proposed for the numerical simulation of power electronic circuits with ideal switches and diodes, and their accompanying control systems. The power electronic circuit is modeled as a complementarity system and the control system is modeled separately. It is shown that the diode state determination problem can be formulated as a complementarity problem. Discontinuous jumps in the state variables are allowed after a switching event. The method is applied to two examples and the numerical accuracy with respect to the step size is compared with time-stepping methods. The importance of the event localization accuracy is discussed.