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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, MAY 2012

Complementary PID Controller to Passivity-Based Nonlinear Control of Boost

Converters With Inductor Resistance
Young Ik Son, Member, IEEE, and In Hyuk Kim, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractSince the DC-DC boost converter exhibits highly nonlinear and non-minimum phase properties, it is not an easy task
to design a controller that is robust against load perturbations.
This paper presents a dynamic output feedback controller for a
DC-DC boost converter that has a practical inductor and a series
resistance. In order to maintain its robust output voltage regulation, the proposed controller adopts a simplified parallel-damped
passivity-based controller (PD-PBC). A complementary proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller to the PD-PBC
has been designed for removing the steady state error owing to
the parasitic resistance. We present sufficient conditions for the
asymptotic stability of the augmented system with an additional
dynamic system. Computer simulations and experimental tests
under reference step changes and load perturbations confirm the
improved performance of the proposed approach.
Index TermsBoost converter, load variation, output feedback
control, parasitic resistance, passivity-based control.

I. INTRODUCTION
ECAUSE the DC voltage generated by fuel cells or photovoltaic systems varies widely in magnitude and unexpected transient states often result from uncertain load variations, a reliable DC-DC boost (step-up) conversion stage is essential to provide a highly regulated DC voltage. This motivates the development of various control algorithms for boost
converters, along with the study of renewable energy sources
[1][5].
Since the DC-DC boost converter has nonlinear characteristics and it is modeled as a non-minimum phase system with
a right-half-plane (RHP) zero, the output voltage regulation
problem of the boost converter has attracted the attention of
many control system researchers as well as power electronics
engineers. Although the controllers based on classical linear
control techniques are simple to implement, it is difficult to deal
with the variation of system parameters. Hence, there have been
continuous efforts to design control strategies for improving the
performance of the power converter (see [6][18] and therein).
For example, Sira-Ramirez and Rios-Bolivar [6] presented a
new sliding mode controller (SMC) to obtain a self-scheduling

Manuscript received December 28, 2010; accepted March 13, 2011. Date
of publication April 21, 2011; date of current version April 11, 2012. This
work was supported in part by the 2nd Brain Korea 21 Project and by the Advanced Human Resource Development Program of Ministry of Knowledge and
Economy (MKE) through the Research Center for Intelligent Microgrid, Myongji University.
Y. I. Son is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Myongji University, Kyunggi-do 449-728, Korea (e-mail: sonyi@mju.ac.kr).
I. H. Kim is with the Electric Development Team, Mitsubishi Elevator Korea
Co., Ltd, Incheon 404-812, Korea (e-mail: ihkim@k-mec.co.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2011.2134099

property under the change in operating conditions. In [7], a modified current-mode control (CMC) algorithm was proposed to
reduce the sensitivity to resistive loads, particularly the constant
control was applied to overcome restrictions of
power load.
the frequency-domain approach in [8]. The bifurcation behavior
of the boost converter using CMC was studied in [9]. The authors of [10] tested the performance of several different control
schemes with experimental comparisons. In [11], the operation
of interleaved boost converters under SMC was analyzed to reduce the ripple voltage amplitude. The effect of RHP zero on
the stability of the system was investigated in [12]. A synergetic
control approach was attempted in [13] to improve the previous
controllers, e.g., SMC. In [14], the need of the inductor current
sensor was removed by a generalized PI SMC. An adaptive controller was proposed in [15] to reduce the output voltage ripple
caused by harmonic disturbances in the input voltage. In [16], a
nonlinear control of the exponential form was proposed to add
an additional tuning parameter to the existing multi-loop CMC.
A tri-state boost converter with an additional switch to remove
the RHP zero was studied in [17]. A different type of a boost
converter with synchronous rectification was dealt with in [18]
using a linear-to-nonlinear translator. Most of the above results,
with the exception of the results of [14] and [18], require both
the input current and the output voltage measurements to implement the control algorithms.
A passivity-based controller (PBC) as one of the robust control algorithms has been applied to many practical control applications including DC-DC power converters [19]. Several authors have considered PBCs to solve the regulation problem
of the boost converter [19][23]. Among them, the paralleldamped PBC (PD-PBC) presented in [21] and [22] has achieved
outstanding performance under reference step changes as well
as load variations. The advantage of the parallel damping approach over the series damping injection is that it is insensitive
to varying loads and uses only voltage measurements [21], [22].
However, the nonlinear controller does not take into consideration the parasitic resistance such as the resistance in the inductor. Although the parasitic resistance is relatively very small,
it cannot be ignored in the practical DC-DC boost converter
because it increases the model uncertainty. Owing to the parasitic resistance, the PD-PBC cannot maintain robust performance under load variations.
The objective of this paper is to provide a robust output feedback controller for the DC-DC boost converter that has two parasitic resistors including the inductor resistance. Based on the
fact that the PD-PBC exhibits robust performances for the ideal
boost converter, this paper extends the application of the approach to the boost converter with a practical inductor. A new
control algorithm that combines a proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller with the PD-PBC is proposed to achieve

1063-6536/$26.00 2011 IEEE

SON AND KIM: COMPLEMENTARY PID CONTROLLER TO PASSIVITY-BASED NONLINEAR CONTROL OF BOOST CONVERTERS

Replacing

827

in (2) with (3) gives

(4)

If
, the value of
as shown in [22]

can then be obtained

(5)

Fig. 1. DC-DC boost converter having parasitic resistance.

robust output regulation against load uncertainties. Sufficient

conditions for the asymptotic stability of the augmented system
with the additional system are presented. In the proposed approach, the PID controller uses an additional system state variable instead of a constant reference value for generating an error
signal. This is the main difference between the proposed controller and conventional PID controllers.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the
mathematical model of the DC-DC boost converter. Section III
summarizes the simplified PD-PBC and describes the design of
the proposed controller for the system considered in this paper.
In Section IV, computer simulations and experimental results
show the performance of the proposed controller in the presence
of reference step changes and load perturbations. In the simulations, we have compared the closed-loop performance with four
different controllers, which were designed using: 1) a generalized PI sliding mode controller (GPI SMC) [14]; 2) a simplified
PD-PBC [22]; 3) a conventional PI controller; and 4) the proposed controller. Finally, Section V presents the conclusions.

does not depend on the variation of load

The control input
.
resistance
On the other hand, the solutions of (4) are given by
(6)

(7)
In the above equations, owing to
and
, the variation of
makes deviations from the nominal equilibrium values. It is
and
when
.
noted that
Section III first reviews a simplified PD-PBC using (5). A
complementary PID controller and its stability analysis are provided.
III. PID CONTROLLER COMBINED WITH SIMPLIFIED PBC
A. Drawback of a Previous PD-PBC
Recently, a simplified PD-PBC has been proposed in [22] for
the case, where

II. DC-DC BOOST CONVERTER MODEL

This paper deals with the output voltage regulation problem
of the DC-DC boost converter shown in Fig. 1. Unlike the inductor considered in [12][14] and [22], we consider a practical
inductor with a parasitic resistance . This model also includes
to represent unavoidable voltage drops and a cura resistor
rent-sensing resistor [24]. The nominal values of the resistors
are assumed to be known.
By using an average switching method, the mathematical
model of Fig. 1 is described by

(1)

(8)
(9)
Replacing
in (5) with
yields a controller, described
in (8), that is independent of the circuit parameters. Hence, the
controller exhibits robust performances under reference step
changes and load variations without a steady state error [22].
or
, (5) is no longer valid, and
However, when
the controller described in (8) leads to a steady-state error.
Instead of using (5) to deal with the non-ideal case, we first
in
consider the equilibrium value shown in (6). By replacing
, we can obtain
(4) and (6) with
(10)

where
is the inductor current;
is the output voltage;
is the DC source voltage; the control input is the duty ratio
; and , , and
denote the inductance, the
capacitance, and the load resistance, respectively.
be the desired output voltage. Then, the equilibrium
Let
,
, and
values
satisfy the following equations:

(11)
The rest of this section proves the feasibility of the controller
in (11) when
and the stability of
as in [22].
The time derivative of (10) yields

(2)
(3)

(12)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, MAY 2012

The error dynamics are obtained by

Fig. 2. Stability of the new input for a boost converter.

(18)
The equilibrium values of (18) are

Using (11) and letting

coincide with its desired value
(12) and (9), we can obtain

and

, where

in

(13)

(19)
Let us define
. Jacobian linearization of (18) at the
above equilibrium point yields
(20)

In addition, from (10), we can obtain

where

is the linearized state and

(14)
Since the denominator of (14) is positive, the phase-plane diagram (see Fig. 2) can be described by (13) and (14) with positive
,
and
. This figure proves the feaconstants
sibility of the controller described by (11) and the asymptotic
[22].
stability of
A main drawback of (11) is that load variations will cause a
steady state error in the regulated output. This drawback comes
and . Hence, the values of
from the change of (6) owing to
and
as well as
should be precisely known to achieve
the control objective.
As a way of making the best use of the robust performance
of the PD-PBC by removing the steady-state error, this paper
presents a new PID controller combined with the dynamics in
(9).

The rest of the design procedure for gains

,
,
, ,
consists of two steps.
and
and
are determined from the
In the first step, gains
Laplace transform of . When
and
,
is represented by
(21)

B. Design of the Proposed Controller

where
The proposed controller is represented by

,
(15)
(16)

. The main difference between the proposed

where
and the conventional PID controller is that the additional state
is employed instead of a constant reference
for
variable
generating the error signal .
In order to determine the parameters of (9) and (16), we first
define error variables as

(17)

, and

In the derivation

.
, we used (21) and the following equation:
(22)

The stability conditions for (21) (or the matrix

(
0, 1, 2) and
. When
,
and the
are positive because

) are that
and

(23)

SON AND KIM: COMPLEMENTARY PID CONTROLLER TO PASSIVITY-BASED NONLINEAR CONTROL OF BOOST CONVERTERS

When
, an additional condition is necessary to obtain
a positive value for

829

TABLE I
NOMINAL PARAMETERS OF DC-DC BOOST CONVERTER

(24)
is satIt can also be shown that the inequality
isfied when the values of
and
are positive. This implies
is stable for all (positive) system pathat the system matrix
if the positive constants
rameters , , , , , , and
and
satisfy inequality (24).
Remark 1: It is not difficult to determine
and
that
satisfy inequality (24)

(25)

and
are relatively small as comBecause the values of
pared to that of , the resulting value of (25) is typically very
small, as in the example of Section IV. In the appendix, a necessary and sufficient condition is also provided to obtain a positive
value of .
We determine the positive constants
and
such that the
denominator of (21) becomes

(26)
In the second step, the PID controller described in (16) is
designed for system (20). Since the system is already stable with
the above values for
and
, the complementary controller
can be designed by various design techniques, including the root
locus method. This paper adopts both the pole-zero cancellation
and the root locus method.
If a dominant pole of system (20) is much smaller than the
other two poles, the PI controller can be designed without using

output feedback controller using only the output voltage measurement.

The performance of the proposed controller is tested by two
examples in Section IV.
IV. DESIGN EXAMPLES
This section includes two examples for computer simulations
and experimental tests. All the computer simulations have been
performed with Matlab/Simulink. The nominal system parameters are listed in Table I.
A. Example 1 [22]: Computer Simulations
We first test whether the proposed controller can be successfully combined with the previous PD-PBC [22] to maintain the
performance without the steady-state error. Hence, the example
provided by [22] (except
) has been considered under
the same reference and load perturbations.
, gains
and
Through the pole-zero cancellation of
are chosen as 0.4204 and 0.7645, respectively. The transfer
function of system (20) is then obtained by

(28)
is much smaller than
Because the dominant pole
the other poles, a PI controller is used to cancel the smallest
pole. With the controller described by

(29)
(27)
Otherwise, the numerator of (16) is designed to remove two
dominant poles of system (20). After the pole-zero cancellain (27) or
in (16) is adjusted in order for the
tion, gain
closed-loop system to remain stable by using the root locus.
The next proposition summarizes the result of this section.
or
the error system
Proposition 1: In the presence of
is Hurwitz when the values of
and
in (9) satmatrix
isfy the condition of (24) with positive values. In this case, the
closed-loop system [see (1), (9), and (15)] is locally asymptotically stabilized and the regulation problem can be solved
without the steady state error by using the complementary controller described by (16). The approach results in a dynamic

gain
is selected as 0.014 through the root locus method, and
.
gain
Comparative simulations were performed with the generalized PI sliding mode controller (GPI SMC) [14], the simplified PD-PBC [22], and a conventional PI controller. The de5 V is changed to 3.5 V at
;
sired voltage
it is then changed from 3.5 to 6 V at
5 ms and finally
9 ms. The load resistance varies from
from 6 to 5 V at
to
at
12 ms. The initial conditions
, and
.
are
Because the SMC is well known for its robustness against
model uncertainties, several authors have presented SMCs for
boost converters (see, e.g., [6], [10], [13], [14]). In [14] the need
of the inductor current sensor was removed by a generalized PI

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, MAY 2012

Fig. 3. Results with GPI SMC when R

(b) output voltage.

= 0 and R = 0:01. (a) Input current;

SMC. The GPI SMC described in [14] has been chosen for comparison because it can be implemented using the voltage measurement only. Fig. 3 shows the effect of the parasitic resistance
on the GPI SMC represented by
for
for

(30)
(31)
(32)

where
,
,
, and
as in [14].
The simulation results with the PD-PBC [see (8)] described
are shown in Fig. 4, where
by [22] when

Fig. 4. Results with the simplified PD-PBC when R

Input current; (b) output voltage.

= 0 and R = 0:01. (a)

and
. The PD-PBC showed better performances
; however, the two controllers
than the GPI SMC when
.
yielded the steady-state error for the small value of
Fig. 5 shows that the proposed algorithm achieves the control
objective without the steady state error. In Fig. 6, the proposed
controller is compared with a conventional PI controller, where
and
. Although the PI controller
has been widely used in practical systems because of its simple
structure and robustness, it is very difficult to find one that leads
to a desirable transient response for the system parameters of
is assumed
[21] and [22]. In Figs. 5 and 6, the real value of
to be larger than its nominal value by 50% to test the robust
performance against the parameter uncertainty.
B. Example 2 [24]: Experimental Tests
This section presents the experimental results obtained by
using a laboratory boost converter [24] (see the parameters

SON AND KIM: COMPLEMENTARY PID CONTROLLER TO PASSIVITY-BASED NONLINEAR CONTROL OF BOOST CONVERTERS

Fig. 5. Proposed controller vs. PD-PBC when R

(b) output voltage.

= 0:015. (a) Input current;

in Table I). The objective is to check whether the proposed

controller can deal with unmodeled dynamics of the converter
system.
, we have chosen gains
By using the zero of
and
. With these gains, (24) is satisfied.
is given by
The transfer function
(33)
As in the first example the smallest pole is cancelled out with
and
a PI controller and the gains are given as
via the root locus method.
Fig. 7 shows the simulation results comparing the performances with a conventional PI controller. It is not difficult to
stabilize this system using a PI controller. The gains of the conand
.
ventional PI controller are

Fig. 6. Proposed versus PI controller when R

output voltage.

831

= 0:015. (a) Input current; (b)

The load resistance varies from

to
at
5 ms by connecting two 40 resistors in par18 V is
allel with the nominal load. The desired voltage
10 ms. In the simulation
53.25 m
changed to 15 V at
and
are used as opposed to the nominal values of
35.5 m and
seen in Table I.
The experimental results are shown in Fig. 8 (proposed
controller) and Fig. 9 (PI controller). Since the system does
not have the inductor current sensor, the current response
could not be included. The divisions of the axes are 1 ms/div
for the -axis and 5 V/div for the -axis. The initial values are
and
. The discrete-time controllers
are implemented using a TI DSP TMS320F28335 and the
sampling frequency is 20 kHz. The results ensure that the
proposed controller can deal with unmodeled system dynamics
and parameter uncertainties.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, MAY 2012

Fig. 7. Simulations with uncertain

voltage.

and

. (a) Input current; (b) output

V. CONCLUSION
Here, the output feedback control problem of the DC-DC
boost converter with an inductor parasitic resistance is studied,
along with variations in the load. Because the simplified
PD-PBC [22] has successfully achieved the control objective
for the converter with an ideal inductor, this paper has tested a
modification of the previous controller to check whether it can
maintain robust performances for the system with a practical
inductor under load variations. In order to remove the steady
state error owing to the parasitic resistance, this paper designs
a complementary PID controller to the PD-PBC. The proposed
approach resulted in a dynamic output feedback controller
using only the output voltage measurement. The robust asymptotic stability of the augmented system has been proved under
the positive gain conditions. Through comparative computer
simulations and experimental tests, the proposed controller has
been shown to have an improved performance and a robust
stability.

Fig. 8. Experimental results with proposed controller. (a) Voltage step up; (b)
load variation; (c) reference change.

APPENDIX
A. Necessary and Sufficient Condition for
Coefficient

can be represented by

(34)

SON AND KIM: COMPLEMENTARY PID CONTROLLER TO PASSIVITY-BASED NONLINEAR CONTROL OF BOOST CONVERTERS

Let us define

833

such that
(37)

then, (19) and (23) and the new parameters

rewritten as

and

are

Some manipulations yield

Hence, the condition in (36) is equivalent to the next inequality

(38)
For the example in Section IV, parameter is also positive, and
and
the above condition is satisfied for all positive constants
. It should be noted that, unlike (24), the condition in (38) is
.
a necessary and sufficient one for
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
their valuable comments to improve this manuscript.
REFERENCES

Fig. 9. Experimental results with PI controller. (a) Voltage step up; (b) load
variation; (c) reference change.

If we define

and

such that
(35)

then the following condition should be satisfied for

positive:

to be

(36)

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