Experimental evaluations of voltage regulators for a saturated boost DC-to-DC power converter

One of the most common nonlinearities in physical systems is input saturation. Input saturation is rarely considered in the analysis and design of controllers for boost power converters. In addition, the lack of inductor-current measurements and exact knowledge of the supply voltage complicates the problem of voltage regulation even more. In this paper, a new controller is introduced and real-time experiments on output-voltage regulation of a saturated DC-to-DC boost power converter are presented. Specifically, we compare a known scheme with a new control strategy. Both schemes rely on an observer, so knowledge of the supply voltage and the inductor-current measurements is not required. The experimental results indicate that the proposed controller presents the best performance.