Multi-objective design optimization of renewable energy system inverters using a Descriptive language for the components

Abstract

Optimization of power electronic converters is certainly not a new subject. However, past efforts have been focused on the use of commercial off-the-shelf components in the design optimization. Thus the resulting system was really optimized only over the set of available components which may in fact represent only a subset of the design space; a reachable space limited somewhat artificially by available components and technologies. While this approach is suited for the engineer seeking to cost-reduce an existing design, it offers little insight into design possibilities for greenfield projects. Instead, this paper seeks to first broaden the reachable design space to identify a globally optimal design for some given objective, from which specifications for the individual components can be derived. A unique outcome of this approach is that new technology development vectors are expected to develop optimized components for the optimized power converter. The approach presented in this paper uses a descriptive language to abstract the characteristics and attributes of the components used in a power electronic converter in a way suitable for multi-objective and constrained optimization methods. This paper will apply this concept by developing generalized energy loss models under non-sinusoidal waveforms for the three most prevalent power supply components: semiconductor switches, inductors and capacitors, these models will be used to form an objective function for the optimization problem, weighted by the optimization parameters of size, weight, cost, and performance.