168

Hardware Implementation of Neural Network Controlled

Optimal PWM Inverter Using TMS320C30 Board

M. Mohaddes A.M. Gole P.G. McLaren

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
email:mohades@ee.umanitoba.ca

Abstract
An optimal PWM scheme is used to control a
voltage source inverter. The switching angles
are controlled by a feed forward artificial neu-
ral network in a way that all non-triplen har-
monics up to the 29th are completely removed
from the output and the amplitude of the funda-
mental is set at the desired level. The neural net-
work is emulated by a TMS320C30 DSP board
along with the other parts of the control unit of
the inverter.
1 Firing Circuit

Intvoduction Fig. 1 Three phase voltage source inverter

PWM is now the most widely used scheme for
voltage source inverter.From the several methods
available to produce a PWM waveform, the space
vector method and the carrier based methods[ 11are
more widely used. They are easy to implement and
do not assume any particular shape for the voltage
they approximate. But, even with relatively high
switching frequencies, there are still considerable
lower order harmonics in their output voltages
[2].The harmonic elimination method on the other
hand is not very popular although it can completely
remove the selected lower order harmonics with
the minimum switching frequency. This is mainly
because of two problems: it is difficult to imple-
ment and it can only approximate a sinewave. The
latter problem has been addressed by some authors
[3], while this paper focuses on the first.
Selected Harmonics Elimination
The circuit diagram of a three phase, two level
voltage source inverter is shown in fig. 1.For a two
level inverter, where the output phase voltage is
always either +E or -E, the r.m.s. value of the volt-
age is always E2. Since the mean square of this
voltage is equal to the sum of the mean squares of
fundamental and all harmonics, then for a given
amplitude of fundamental, the total harmonic dis-
tortion is always the same, regardless of the
selected switching method. But the switching
instants can be adjusted such that the selected
lower harmonics disappear (or decrease substan-
tially) at the expense of increase in other harmon-
ics. Since loads are usually inductive, higher
harmonics can be filtered more easily by the load
without need of additional filters. Also as the tri-
plen current harmonics cannot flow in a three wire-
three phase system, there is no need to eliminate
the triplen harmonics in the phase voltages.
The magnitude of harmonics for a PWM waveform
with odd and half wave symmetries, and n switch-
ing actions per quarter cycle of fundamental, is
obtained from the following equations:
I-2cosa
1 +2cosa2
- 2 c o s a j . . .2cosan]

ISBN 0-7803-4147-3lIEEE CAT. NO. 97CH36117 Q 1997 IEEE 1 9 9 7 Conference on Communications, Power and Computing
WESCANEXP7 Proceedings; Winnipeg, MB; May 22-23,1997; pp. 168-173
169
h3 = ( 8 . & ) . [ 1 - 2cos3a + 2 cos3 a2
- 2 COS39.. .2COS3an
1
hk = (8.;). ~ 1 - 2 c o s k a1 +2coska2
-2coska3...2coskan]
where E is half of the DC source voltage, hi is the
magnitude of the ith harmonic and ajis the jth
switching angle.
To find the a9sneeded for elimination of specific
harmonics, it is sufficient to set the corresponding
h’s in the above equations to zero and solve for the
a’s. The value of h, could be any desired value
between zero and some value less than 1.25E. The
exact maximum of hi depends on the eliminated
harmonics.
During the operation of the inverter, the desired
value of h i may change, so eq. (1) must be solved
for new values of hl. These equations are nonlinear
and can be solved only by iterative methods. This
process is time consuming, may diverge, and is
therefore not suitable for on-line implementation.
The conventional approach to this problem is to
solve the equations off-line and save the results in
a look up table. Our approach is to use a feed-for-
ward neural network which accepts modulation
index as input, and outputs the switching angles[4-
51. These angles are then used by the firing system
along with the desired frequency to find the exact
ON and OFF instants for every switch of the
inverter.
Structure of The Inverter
The inverter used in this project consists of three
double IGBT modules with the ratings of 600V
and 50 Amps each. The DC supply is a three pulse
diode rectifier with a large capacitor filter. Since
the DC current changes rapidly, we need a snubber
circuit to protect the IGBT’s against the over volt-
ages caused by the inductances of the DC supply
and wires. The simple snubber circuit of fig.2 has
proved to be quite sufficient in this case. D is a fast
Fig. 2 Snubber Circuit
recovery diode, C is a 1pF DC capacitor and R is a
la resistor.
The triggering signals for the IGBT’s are produced
by hybrid driver circuits which provide the neces-
sary isolation between the C30 board and the
inverter. Since drivers of the three upper IGBT’s
must have separate grounds to avoid the short
circuiting of emitters, each driver is supplied by a
separate DC source. These sources are actually six
DC-DC converters fed by a common 5Volts sup-
Ply.
The number of chops per quarter cycle of output
waveform was decided to be 9. This way all cur-
rent harmonics up to the 29th are removed. The
maximum magnitude of the fundamental for this
case is 1 15E. Eq. (1) has no solution for values of
e
h i greater than this.
The Artificial Neural Network
The neural network used is a feedfonvard two
layer network with one input and n output neurons.
The input is the desired amplitude of the funda-
mental in per unit and the outputs are the switching
angles. Different numbers of hidden units were
tried and it was found that usually about n/2 hidden
neurons are sufficient.
The neural network is trained off-line. To produce
the training set for the ANN, eq. 1 is solved for
more than 100 equally spaced values of hi. As
explained before, the triplen current harmonics
cannot flow out of this inverter, so the correspond-
ing equations are not considered. The amplitude of
all other harmonics are set to be zero.
In the hardware prototype the neural network is
emulated by a subroutine. The weights and biases
of the network obtained in the training stage are
loaded to the C30 board at the initialization time.
Then every time the input to the network is
changed by the user, the subroutine i s called and
calculates the switching angles.
 170

Piece wise-linear neural network

When the sigmoid transfer function is used for the
neurons, the ANN subroutine is not fast enough
because calculation of exponential function and

1
P

-5 4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Fig. 3 Piecewise linear characteristic

division takes a lot of time for each neuron. To
solve this problem, we replaced the sigmoid trans- x) 2, Y e
..oa
65

fer function of neurons with a piecewise-linear Fo""sr A"'Iy.'.

_..">U

transfer function (Fig. 3). When we replace the sig-

moid characteristic with the picewise-linear in a
trained network, the obtaining switching angles are -2=
not far from the previous ones. But since the mag- g *
nitude of harmonics in the output voltage is very
sensitive to changes in a's, we have unacceptably
large harmonics in the output. Fig. 4 shows a typi- 0 s ,o *s 20
Ha-ni~
25
Nudsr
30 35 .O s. 60

cal output voltage waveform and spectrum for this

case. To solve this problem, we chose to train the
network considering the piecewise-linear charac-
teristic for neurons. Although in this case the
objective function is not differentiable at all points,
it is still continuous and therefore it is possible to
fig. 5 Simulation Results: Voltage and current
waveforms and spectra for picewise-linear net-
work
find a global minimum. We used the weights of the
previous network (with nonlinear neurons) as the
starting point and chose back propagation as the
optimization technique. Since for modulation
index M greater than 1 the variations of a's with M
is highly nonlinear, we limited M to 1. This way
we could reduce the number of hidden units to 3
and get quite satisfactory results. Fig. 5 illustrates
the voltage and current waveforms and spectra for
two different values of M. All harmonics up to the
29th are cancelled and the load current has very lit-
tle ripple

Implementation of the Controller on

Fig.4 Simulation results for piecewise-linear network
with the weights of sigmoid-neuron network
the C30 Board
The information flow between the inverter, C30
board and the host PC is as shown in fig.3 The win-
dows-based graphical user interface program is run
on the host pc. This program initializes the C30
board and loads the C30 program. The two pro-
171
Fig. 6 Signal flow diagram
grams communicate by hand shaking method. At
start up the C30 program loads the neural network
weights and biases from a disc file to the board’s
memory. Then it resets the timers and defines six
pins of the serial port as the general purpose out-
puts[6]. These outputs convey the ON/OFF signals
to the IGBT drivers. After that the program enters
an infinite loop.
In the infinite loop the program is waiting for new
values of voltage or frequency sent by the PC pro-
gram. Every time a new value for the inverter out-
put voltage amplitude is sent to the C30, the neural
network function is called and the switching angles
for the first quarter cycle are determined. Then the
switching angles for the whole cycle of all three
phases are calculated. Using the specified fre-
quency, the program then computes the time inter-
val between every two successive switching
actions, no matter which phase they belong to.
These time intervals are translated to the number of
timer clock pulses.
The C30 Board
f 7
Switching sig-
nals to IGBT
LA drivers
S.
time to next
Intr.
Timer routine 3Serial port
Fig. 7 Firing control routines
After each switching action, the time interval to
the next switching in pulse number is loaded in the
timer’s period register and the timer starts running.
When the timer reaches the value specified in the
period register, it sends an interrupt signal to the
C30 processor. The processor then calls an inter-
rupt routine.
The interrupt routine first finds which phase of the
inverter should change its state, then applies the
necessary changes to the serial port’s control regis-
ter. A short dead time is inserted between tuming
off one IGBT and tuming on the other to take into
account the delay of the switch. By loading the
time interval to the next switching to the period
register the interrupt routine completes its job and
control goes back to the main C30 routine.Fig.4
shows the internal relations of the firing system’s
components.
Graphical User Interface
A C++ program runs on the host PC to provide a
convenient way to communicate between the user
and the firing control program running on the C30.
This program also initializes the C30 board and
loads the firing control program to it. Fig. 5 shows
the GUI window. As shown, voltage and frequency
Fig. 8 The GUI window
can be changed either by sliders or by typing the
values directly into the text child windows. By
means of radio buttons the user can choose to
change the two values independently or propor-
tionally. When the exit command is issued, the
GUI program sends the proper signal to the C30
program to turn off all the three upper IGBTs and
turn on the lower ones. Thus the output voltages
will be zero and a freewheeling path is provided
 172

for the load current. cant mechanical transients. One should also be

Results 20
I I
M
"
I

The proposed system was tested using a 5Hp,208V

induction motor as load. A DC generator was con-
nected to the induction machine shaft to provide
the mechanical load. Figures 6 and 7 show the cur-
rent waveforms for constant Volts per Herz control
at 50% and 100% of rated speed. As can be seen,
N
-

Fig. 10 Experimental Results: Current

waveform and fft for V=l .Op.u. and f=60Hz

cautious with fast change of frequency as this may

result in large transient currents. Fig. 8 shows the
Fig. 9 Experimental Results: Current wave- current for 1Hz step change in frequency.
form and its fft for v=O.5p.u. and f=30Wz

in both cases all harmonics up to the 29th are prac-

tically cancelled and the first harmonics to appear
are 29th and 3 1st. The waveform improves signifi-
cantly by increasing the voltage magnitude and fre-
quency as expected. The number of chops per
cycle can be increased for lower fundamental fre-
quencies. This will provide a constant switching
frequency and smoother current waveforms. But
changing the number of pulses can produce signifi-
I I If I ' I( " I

Fig. 8 Experimental Results: Current

transient after a 1Hz step change in fie-
173

Conclusion
The experimental results show the possibility and
usefulness of controlling the switching angles of
voltage-source inverter by means of an artificial
neural network. The TMS320C30 signal process-
ing chip proved to be adequate for emulating the
neural network and performing the necessary cal-
culations for firing control. In constant frequency
applications such as UPS and STATCOM the out-
put current can be easily filtered as almost only two
harmonics appear in the output.

References
[ 13 J.Holtz, “Pulsewidth Modulation-A Survey”
IEEE Trans. Ind. Elec. Vol. 39, NO. 5, Dec. 1992.

[2] D.G. Holmes, ‘The significance of zero space

vector placement for carrier-based PWM
schemes”, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl. VOL. 32, NO. 5 ,
SepJOct. 1996.

[3] J.Holtz, B.Beyer, ‘The trajectory Tracking

Approach-A New Method for Minimum Distortion
PWM in Dynamic High Power Drives”, IEEE
Trans. Ind. App. Vol. 30, No. 4, july/Aug. 1994.

[4] M.Mohaddes, A.M.Gole, P.G.McLaren, “An

artificial Neural Network Controller for an Optimal
PWM Voltage Source Inverter” 3 1st Universities
Power Engineering Conference, UPEC’96, Iraklio,
Greece.

[5] M-Mohaddes, A.M.Gole, P.G.McLaren, “Har-

monic Elimination in PWM Inverter Using Neural
Network” 1994 Canadian Conference of Electrical
and Computer Engineering CSECE’94, Halifax,
Canada.

[6]Texas Instruments, “Third-Generation TMS320

User’s Guide” 1988,Texas Instruments Incorpo-
rated.