Abstract
Induction heating (IH) applications aided power electronic control and becomes most attractive in recent years. Power control plays a vital role in any IH applications in which the stability of the converter is still a research hot spot due to variable frequency operation. In the proposed work, the stability of the converter is carried out based on the Floquet theory for dual-frequency half-bridge series inverter-fed multiload IH system. The dynamic behaviour of the converter is analyzed by developing a small-signal model of the converter. The system with a dynamic closed-loop controller results in poles and zeros lying outside the unit circle, which has poor closed-loop stability and up-down glitches in the frequency response plot. Hence, a proportional-integral (PI) compensator is used to mitigate the said issue, which results in a better response when compared with the open system and works satisfactorily. However, the system becomes unstable when the frequency is varied and the system also possesses a poor time domain response. Hence, the values of the controller gain are optimized with the Floquet theory, which is based on the Eigenvalues of the time domain model. For the optimized gains, the system possesses better stability for the variations in the switching frequency (20 kHz to 24 kHz), and also, the frequency response of the system is better with minimum time domain specifications. The performance of the system is simulated in MATLAB, and the response is noted for various switching frequencies in open loop, with a PI compensator, and with an optimized PI compensator. The output power is varied from 500 W to 18 W at load 1 and 250 W to 9 W at load 2. It is noted from the output response that the rise time is 0.0085 s, the peak time is 0.0001 s, and the peak overshoot is 0.1% with minimum steady-state error. Furthermore, the IH system is validated using a PIC16F877A microcontroller with the optimized PI controller, and the thermal image is recorded using a FLIR thermal imager.