Fractional-Order Control for Voltage Regulation in Bidirectional Converters: An Experimental Study

The theoretical application of fractional equations in controller development is not a new topic. The first efforts on this topic were reported in the late 1970s. However, in the last four years, a greater number of papers related to fractional control have been published than the one accumulated in previous years. Motivated by the above, this paper reports the step-by-step development of this type of control in a bidirectional converter. Furthermore, the discrete-time equivalent of the developed fractional control is implemented on Texas Instruments F280042C digital signal processor. The experimental results of the discrete fractional compensator are compared with the experimental results of a conventional proportional integral derivative (PID) controller. The results show a notable improvement in the response of the bidirectional converter with the fractional control; specifically, faster responses and less overshoot in most of the experiments carried out. Also, the existing challenges facing the widespread application of this control technique are notorious and are extensively addressed in this article.