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ABSTRACT: Power electronic converters must be suitably controlled in order to fulfill their load steady-state and dynamic requirements. Standards on power quality or performance enhancement require that power converters must also comply to specifications applicable to the electrical network. These issues led to recent developments on the control methodologies applied to switching power converters.

This presentation will review non-linear control methodologies for switching power converters, such as sliding mode control (SMC), optimum predictive control (OPC) and “Backstepping”.

Robustness property of SMC will be analyzed, together with the SMC main design steps. Algorithms and implementation of OPC will be presented, analyzed and examples given. Backstepping will be introduced and illustrated. Based on the system direct dynamics OPC requires powerful data acquisition and processing devices, mainly when applied to multilevel or matrix converters, but is a capable control approach that can solve some SMC issues. The presentation will conclude with predictive control using the converter inverse dynamics (Inverse Dynamics Predictive Control), as a way to apply OPC to multilevel converters with high number of voltage levels, while saving computation power of data acquisition and processing systems.