Instability, subharmonics, and chaos in power electronic systems

The concept of chaos is applied to a variety of nonlinear power electronic circuits. With the onset of instability, the phenomena of subharmonics, quasi-periodicity, and chaos are predicted and observed. The following examples are dealt with: diodes with charge storage (with application to resonant converters); a ferroresonant circuit; a controlled thyristor rectifier circuit; and a Buck converter controlled by pulse-width modulation (PWM). The examples were chosen to model aspects of real power electronic systems. Analytical and experimental results demonstrate the complex nonlinear phenomena such as subharmonics, quasi-periodicity and chaos can arise in even the simplest systems