Problems of computing Lyapunov exponents in power electronics

Ideal power converters are governed by differential equations with discontinuous right-hand sides. General-purpose algorithms to compute their Lyapunov exponents assume smooth equations, so are not directly applicable to power electronics. We review the methods and their problems, focusing on the largest Lyapunov exponent, which dominates system behavior. The variational approach can incorporate an algorithm by Muller (1995) to cope with the discontinuities found in power electronics. As an example, the method is applied to verify chaos in a buck DC-DC converter