Fully equipped half bridge building block for fast prototyping of switching power converters

With the advent of high performance digital controllers, the time and effort to implement new control algorithms for the control of power electronic converters have decreased drastically. Nevertheless, the design and the practical implementation of power electronic converters, intended for testing new control algorithms, are still complicated and time consuming activities. Therefore, a fully equipped half bridge test platform was designed ready to use as a fundamental building block for various converter types. The test platform incorporates fault protection, measurements of well-selected voltages and currents, and is directly interfacable with most digital and analog controllers. Due to these features and the flexibility of the board, this half bridge converter can be used for research as well as for educational purposes in applications ranging from a simple 100 W buck converter up to 10 kW inverters for motor control. The platform is demonstrated in this paper by means of some basic converter topologies, the half bridge boost converter and the full bridge buck converter.