Decentralized control

of a different rated parallel UPS systems

Ryszard Strzelecki, Daniel Wojciechowski

Department of Ship Automation
Gdynia Maritime University
Gdynia, Poland
rstrzele@am.gdynia.pl, dwojc@am.gdynia.pl,

Abstract— The paper presents the single phase uninterruptible • control of parallel operating voltage source inverters
power supply (UPS) system with galvanic separated (VSI) with the LC output filter, which constitute an
DC-AC-DC-AC converters operating in parallel. The CAN output converter of each UPS module,
physical layer based system of communication between
converters has been developed and applied, which allow to utilize • reliable, disturbances immune communication between
a decentralized master-slave control providing high availability particular modules.
factor of the whole UPS system. The control system of particular
converters has been developed to ensure a high quality of the In the proposed configuration an effective master-slave
output voltage for both linear and nonlinear load. The selected control method (Fig. 1) of VSIs operating in parallel for the
simulations and experimental results obtained for 5kVA autonomous system has been applied. The master unit provides
prototype modules are presented. the reference current for itself and for all the slave units, and
slave units only realize this reference current control [1], [3]. In
Keywords- uninterruptible power supply, decentralized control, consequence, a master unit is controlled in the system with
parallel operation of the voltage source inverters both the outer voltage control loop and inner current control
loop, whereas slave units are controlled by using only the inner
I. INTRODUCTION current control loop. It is important for master unit to fulfill the
following requirements:
Uninterruptible power supplies are the key element of the
supply systems that provide electrical energy with very high • precise control of the output AC voltage in case of
availability and of very high quality. In the special cases, i.e.
for selected loads in a data centers, a requirement for the iL ,M L io,M
availability is equal to 99,9999999%, what means that iLset
Master uo
statistically the system doesn’t operate only for 30 ms per a
year. Such a high requirement can be fulfilled by using on-line C iC,M io
VFI power electronics systems with redundancy, without the iL ,S1 L io,S1 Loads
single points of failure (SPOF) and with the special Slave 1
maintenance procedures. C iC,S1
The redundancy and reduction of SPOFs is possible to
obtain only by using a modules which operate in parallel iL ,Sn L io,Sn
supplying a common loads [1], [2], [3], [4]. Such a Slave n
configuration makes it necessary to implement an appropriate C iC,Sn
hardware and software solutions, in particular:
Figure 1. UPS system with parallel operating master-slave units
(without bypass)
 P
A
Battery B L

12V 0V IW
IW

N K1 K1 +15V
-
15V
N

A1K A1K
2 2

P
A A2 A2

+15V

+15V
-15V

-15V
IW

IW
12V 0V IW

N IW
Output
+15V
-
15V

Figure 2. The main circuit of the single UPS module of rated power 5kVA (control circuits and EMI filters are not depicted)

supplying both linear and nonlinear loads (up to
required crest factor (CF) of the loads,
• controlled power sharing between VSIs of all the
connected modules in steady as well as transient states.
Therefore, it is necessary to provide the reference current
samples from master unit to every slave unit on each pulse
width modulation (PWM) period, so as to provide fastest
possible control response for changes of load.
To ensure elimination of SPOFs it is necessary to provide a
full functionality of each module. It means, that each of the
module has to be equally capable to operate as a master unit
and a slave unit. It is the only method to provide a functionality
of the whole UPS system in case of malfunction of the master
unit.
The proposed system utilizes a specially developed
communication, that realizes all the tasks which are the result
of requirements listed above. Both the physical and logical
layers of this communication are described in the paper.
The paper presents results of simulations and experiments
realized for the 5 kVA UPS modules.
II. THE CONTROL SYSTEM OF MASTER AND SLAVE UNITS
The electrical circuit of single UPS module is presented in
Fig. 2. The main components of each module are:
• DC-DC converter with the separating
transformer,
• voltage source inverter with the output LC filter,
• thyristor AC switch for UPS bypass circuit.
The control system of each UPS module includes control of
all the components listed above with taken into account a
parallel operation of VSI as well as AC switch. The
instantaneous power is shared between particular modules
proportionally to its rated power. The bypass is switched on
synchronously on each parallel operating module in case of
system overload.
The control system was designed based on the following
equations which describe the output AC circuit (Fig. 1):
diL du
L = U DC ⋅ d − uo , C o = iC = iL − io , (1)
dt dt
where UDC denotes the voltage on the DC side of VSI of each
UPS module, and d denotes a state of VSI related with
particular combination of transistors states. The state d can be
equal to –1, 0, or 1. For the purpose of control system
formulation it is sufficient to use the simplified averaged model
without modulation. For this case equation (1) has the
following form:
diL du
L = uinv − uo , C o = iC = iL − io , (2)
dt dt
where uinv denotes the VSI output voltage.
The control system of UPS module VSI is presented in
Fig. 3. The main parts of the system are the outer voltage
control loop and the inner current control loop. From the
current controller viewpoint the UPS module output voltage uo
pulse constitutes a disturbance. The controller employs both feedback
and feedforward control. As a feedforward the measured UPS
module output voltage is used, which decouples controller from
disturbance. Similarly, the output current constitutes a
disturbance for the voltage controller, and it has been
decoupled in the same manner. The purpose of the switch
which is depicted in Fig. 3 is the selection of master or slave
mode of control. The VSI output voltage is generated by using
an unipolar PWM with the switching times updated (and also
control system computed) in its every half period.
 iLset
Model of the controlled system (equation 2)
slave iL
uoset 1 1 uo
KU KI K=1
+ + master + + + sL + sC
− + − + − −
io,M or io ,S uo uo io,M or io ,S

Figure 3. The block diagram of the UPS module VSI

with 30MHz clock signal which is generated inside FPGA. The

III. COMMUNICATION BETWEEN UPS MODULES
A. The Physical Layer
The proposed solution of communication between UPS
modules is based on reliable ring topology with the physical
layer consistent with the CAN standard, and specially
developed logical layer with master/slave units selection
procedures and system diagnostics.
The general diagram of the physical layer of CAN
communication is shown in Fig. 4. The system utilizes two
independent CAN communication channels. Each channel is
built-up form the bus controller, galvanic isolation and
integrated CAN controller. The Microchip MCP2515 CAN
controllers with serial user interface has been utilized. The
maximum transfer rate of this controller is equal to 1 Mb/s.
Data is transferred to/from the CAN bus from/to the floating
point digital signal processor ADSP21065L via FPGA chip
FLEX6016. In FPGA data is bidirectional converted from
series to parallel form, depending on the direction of data
transfer. The data is transferred between FPGA and CAN
controller using SPI interface. The serial user interface is timed
ADSP21065L
FLEX6016
MCP2515 MCP2515
ADUM2402 ADUM2402
CAN controller is separated from the bus controller with
insulation strength equal to 5 kVrms, and propagation time
equal to 32 ns. For this purpose the separation chip
ADUM2402 from Analog Devices has been used. It is based on
the MOS structure and coreless pulse transformers. The
PCA82C250 CAN bus controller has been utilized.
The whole physical communication layer provides the data
transfer rate equal to 1 Mb/s. The system is very immune to
EMI disturbances from power electronics converters and its
environment.
B. Tasks of the Logical Layer
To fulfill the requirements described in chapter II of the
paper regarding the control of UPS system, and in order to
provide its high availability factor, the logical layer of
communication provides:
• transmission of reference current samples from master
unit to all slave units in every PWM impulse period,
• procedure of determining the master unit during a
system startup,
• fast procedure of determining a new master unit after
malfunction of present master unit,
• system checkup and master/slave determining after hot
(realized during UPS system operation) connection of a
new module,
• correct operation of UPS system in case of momentary
or permanent communication malfunction,
• correct transmission in case of single brake of the
communication bus (ring topology).
In order to provide maximum robustness of the system all
the communication procedures are synchronized with the main
software interrupt of the each UPS system module, what has
been shown on Fig. 5.

PCA82C250 PCA82C250 C. The First Communication Channel

The first channel is assigned to transmit the control signal
(reference current) from master unit to all the slave units only.
Channel 1 Channel 2 The lack of competitive access to this channel ensures
connector connector transmission of the control signal with the predictable, constant
delay time. The data frame for the single transmitted sample is
Figure 4. Basic diagram of the CAN communication channels longer that the sampling frequency of the DSP controller, and
Master RC load. The simulations were realized in POWERSYS PSIM
7.0 environment. It is clear from the results, that the
CAN
Data 1 Data 2 Data 3
instantaneous current of the particular modules is determined
and controlled at the level which is proportional to its rated
Receive of data 1 Receive of data 2
Slave 1 power. The transient states related with turning on and turning
Receive of data 1 Receive of data 2
off the load do not substantially disturb the output voltage of
Slave 2 the UPS system.
Receive of data 1 Receive of data 2
Slave 3
TABLE I. THE UPS MODULE CIRCUIT PARAMETERS
Figure 5. Exemplary transmission in channel 1
Quantity Value
from that reason data is transmitted in every second sampling Battery voltage 48 V
period (which corresponds to the UPS system VSI PWM
period). The lack of control signal transmission for the VSI input DC voltage 370 V
predetermined period of time leads to initialization of the new VSI output voltage 230 V RMS
master unit determination procedure in channel 2.
Output voltage frequency 50 Hz
Fig. 5 presents the typical transmission in channel 1. The
impulses which are visible in transients 1, 3, 4, and 5 shows the VSI AC filter inductance 150 uH
instants of interrupts in master unit and three slave units. The
second transient shows the bus activity. It is clear from that VSI AC filter capacitance 100 uF
transients, that the control signal data transferred by the master PWM carrier frequency 10 kHz
is received by the slave units in the next software interrupt
following the end of transmission on the CAN bus. Because the Sampling frequency 20 kHz
software control interrupts in the particular modules of the UPS
system are not synchronized together, the control signal is V. CONCLUSION
received by slave modules at different instants of time, but
always within the time of one sampling period. In the paper the complex hardware, software, and control
solutions for the decentralized UPS system with parallel
D. The Second Communication Channel operating modules has been presented. The system was
designed to provide the supply of the critical loads with very
The second communication channel is used to determine high availability factor. Presented results confirm high
the hierarchy of parallel operating modules based on predefined dynamics of the output voltage control and precise power
parameter which determines the priority of each module. After sharing between the UPS modules controlled according to the
connection to the system the module tries to set itself to the proposed method. The development work was realized within
master mode by transmitting several times the data with its the Development Project of Polish Ministry of Science and
priority parameter. The remaining modules of the system Higher Education R01 002 01.
receives that message, compare the received priority parameter
with its own parameter and in case when the own priority is
higher it begins to transmit it to other modules. If the received ACKNOWLEDGMENT
priority parameter is not higher than the own one, the module Authors wish to thank Mr. Piotr Reiter and Mr. Mariusz
sets its control mode to slave. In case when several modules Rutkowski for their important contribution to this project.
have the same priority, the last connected module sets its mode
to master.

IV. THE RESULTS OF UPS SYSTEM INVESTIGATION

Fig. 6 shows the prototype of UPS module of rated power
5 kVA. Basic parameters of the circuit are listed in Tab. 1. The
module has been constructed by the PEDC group in Gdynia
Maritime University [5]. The selected properties of the module
during autonomous operation (current, output voltage, voltage
harmonics, load parameters) are presented in the experimental
results in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8. The measurements were realized
using power quality analyzer Fluke 434. For the linear load the
total harmonic distortion of the output voltage is equal to
THDu=1,1%, and for the nonlinear load with crest factor
CF=2,99 – THDu=2,3%. In Fig. 9 are depicted the simulation
results with transients of currents and voltage obtained for the
UPS system of three parallel operating modules of rated power
5 kVA, 3kVA, and 2kVA supplying the bridge rectifier with
Figure 6. Prototype of the 5 kVA module of UPS system
 Figure 7. The autonomous operation of an UPS module supplying a linear load of power 5,2 kW

Figure 8. The autonomous operation of an UPS module supplying the a nonlinear load of power 3,18 kW and crest factor CF=2,99

uo REFERENCES
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Dong-Seok Hyun, In-Young Suh, “A master and slave control strategy
io for parallel operation of three-phase UPS systems with different ratings,”
Proc. of APEC 2004, Vol. 1, pp. 456–462, 2004.
[2] Josep M. Guerrero, Luis García de Vicuña, Jose Matas, Jaume Miret,
Miguel Castilla, “A high-performance DSP-controller for parallel
io ,M operation of online UPS systems,” Proc. of APEC 2004, Vol. 1,
pp.:463–469, 2004.
io ,S1
[3] Hongtao Shan, Yong Kang, Xikun Chen, Mi Yu, “Novel & practical
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[4] S.J. Chiang, C.H. Lin and C.Y. Yen, “Current limitation control for
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[5] www.pedc.am.gdynia.pl
Figure 9. Parallel operation of the UPS system with three modules of rated
power 5 kVA, 3 kVA oraz 2 kVA. Transient state related with turning on and
turning off the loads. Simulation