Remotized Control of Power Electronic Devices Exploiting a Plastic Optical Fiber Photonic Bus

Nowadays, a new energy revolution is in act. This trend can be noticed from the explosive growth of portable devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets) industry processes, hybrid cars and many others. Power Electronic assumes a fundamental role in this revolution, since it represents the technique with which the power is transferred from the source to the load. These developments are leading digital control into becoming the enabling technology for many engineering fields and Power Electronic Converters (PECs) into being used in several applications such as computer power supplies, energy conversion, hybrid electric vehicles and motor drive control, suggesting the possibility of new and better integration of advanced power conversion and ICT services. Traditionally, each PEC has a dedicated embedded controller on board, and also, the State of the Art about the control of PEC is mainly focused on the use of optical fibers as “one signal per fiber”. In this work we investigated a method to remotize the control of PEC by means of a plastic optical fiber, passing in this way from a centralized to a shared centralized control, and thus making PEC a black box compatible with any off-board controller. In particular, the scope of this thesis consists into defining a proper communication protocol for the photonic bus in order to link together PECs and their remote control and making possible the control and synchronization of several power converters, enabling real-time control and telemetry. A proof-of-concept demonstrator is presented and tested. It consists of a Control Unit and a remote node, that have both an on-board Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) to elaborate the data, while for the implementation of the photonic bus a PolyMethyl MethAcrylate (PMMA) Step Index Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) has been used, being immune from the Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) coming from PECs. Moreover, the possible evolution towards a power electronic cloud with remote management and orchestration is described.