1. Introduction
Due to its advantage of high specific impulse, electric propulsion technology has been widely used in the field of aerospace at home and abroad [
1,
2]. Among them, the Power Processing Unit (PPU) is mainly used to provide various voltages and currents required for ion thrusters, including heating, ignition, and ion acceleration, etc., which is the core of ion electric propulsion technology [
3,
4]. A typical ion thruster PPU consists of a beam supply, an accelerating power supply, an anode power supply, a cathode heating power supply, a cathode ignition power supply, a neutralizer cathode heating power supply, a neutralizer contact power supply, and a neutralizer cathode ignition power supply. The main function of the beam supply is to provide voltage and power to establish the electric field between the two gates of the thruster and the acceleration of Xenon ions. The output voltage can reach 2 kV, and the output power can reach 10 kW, accounting for more than 80% of the output power of the entire PPU, and it is the key point of the PPU design with high efficiency and high reliability [
5,
6,
7,
8].
At present, according to the different application environments at home and abroad, the research on the beam supply is mainly shown in the topology structure and control methods. Astrium’s ion thruster beam supply adopts a resonant DC/DC topology for the main circuit, and a push-pull topology for the second conversion circuit to achieve small-range voltage regulation. The topology design is a single control loop, which cannot control the current of the system [
9,
10,
11]. A non-resonant full-bridge circuit is adopted for the beam supply of the thruster of “Deep Space No. 1”, which can meet the wide dynamic range and high power demand. Due to the hard switch, the PPU efficiency will be greatly reduced due to heat consumption [
12,
13]. The domestically designed LIP-300 ion thruster beam supply is composed of three 500 V/1500 W power supply modules in series. The phase-shifting full-bridge topology is adopted to realize zero voltage and zero current switching (ZVZCS) technology, which reduces the switching loss of the switch tube and improves the product efficiency, keeping the same with foreign countries [
14,
15].
When the spacecraft is performing space flight missions, different mission stages (such as position maintenance, orbit transfer, attitude control, etc.) require different thrust forces, which require the ion thruster to work in multiple modes. That is, different stages require different thrust forces [
15]. Moreover, a wide range of light intensity and temperature will cause a wide range of variations in output power and voltage of the solar array, so an electric propulsion system is required to realize a wide range of multi-point operations [
16,
17,
18].
Therefore, different from other switching power supplies, beam supply has the following main characteristics. The first is to require itself to have the characteristics of short-time high-power output. Second, its load characteristics vary greatly. The third is the multi-mode operation. To improve the performance of the control system and ensure the spacecraft running continuously and stably in orbit, the beam supply usually adopts a mature double closed-loop PI control system of outer voltage loop and inner current loop. However, in space applications, the nonlinear dynamics of the DC converter are quite complex, and it is vulnerable to electromagnetic interference, input line interference, load interference, single-particle flip interference, and so on. In other words, when the system is subject to external disturbance and internal parameters change, the control effect of the double closed-loop PI control system will significantly decrease [
19,
20].
In the 1980s, researcher Jingqing Han put forward a new nonlinear Control theory, Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC), based on the in-depth study of PID Control. The core idea is that all the uncertain factors acting on the controlled object are reduced to unknown disturbances, and the input and output data are estimated and compensated by the extended observer to improve the disturbance rejection performance and parameter robustness of the system [
21,
22]. ADRC technology, as a practical design method, has been successfully applied in various engineering fields, especially in high-speed and high-precision control and occasions with obvious external disturbances [
23,
24,
25,
26,
27]. However, the nonlinear function is introduced into the controller, which increases the complexity of parameter tuning to some extent. To simplify parameter tuning and apply it quickly in practical engineering, Professor Zhiqiang Gao puts forward Linear Active Disturbance Rejection Control (LADRC). The linear function is adopted to control the system, and a new bandwidth parameterization technology is adopted to greatly simplify the parameter setting process [
28,
29,
30]. Many studies have shown that LADRC has not only stronger robustness and disturbance rejection performance but also easy parameter tuning, so it has been successfully applied in many projects [
31,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39].
This paper proposes a new control strategy for beam power supply, that is, a double closed-loop control strategy with LADRC as the outer voltage loop and PI control as the inner current loop, and builds a simulation and experimental platform. Simulation and experiments show that the designed controller has good parameter robustness and anti-interference performance. The structure of this paper is as follows:
Section 1 analyzes the working principle of the new double full bridge ZVZCS converter of beam power supply;
Section 2 introduces the design of the LADRC controller based on the previous modeling work [
40]; in
Section 3, the simulation model is built in MATLAB/Simulink;
Section 4 gives the experimental results; and
Section 5 summarizes the full text.
5. Experimental Verification
To verify the control effect of the LADRC controller under actual conditions, a 2 kW beam supply prototype is designed based on the TMS320F28335 core processor, as shown in
Figure 13 and
Figure 14. The experimental instruments used are as follows: DC electronic load, DC power supply, oscilloscope, high-voltage differential probe, current probe, beam supply experimental prototype, Kingview upper computer, etc. The two controllers’ performance was verified by the prototype’s reference mutation, load mutation, and dual mode switching experiments.
5.1. Hardware Design
The technical indicators of the converter and the parameters of the main components used are shown in
Table 2 and
Table 3. The specific design process is as follows.
The transformer transformation ratio is 1:10, and the calculation of primary winding
np is shown in Equation (15). Where ∆
B is the magnetic flux density and
Ae is the effective cross-sectional area of the magnetic flux. The magnetic core selected in this paper is ETD59, and the corresponding parameters are: ∆
B = 0.2 T,
Ae = 368.4 mm
2. The calculation result is that the number of primary turns of transformer is
np = 10.9. The actual number of primary turns is taken as 12 T, and the number of secondary turns is 120 T.
- 2.
Semiconductor device selection;
The voltage and current stress of inverter MOS tube and rectifier diode are shown in
Table 4.
According to the parameters in
Table 4, the MOS tube with model IXFH50N30Q3 (300 V/50 A) is selected as the switch tube on the inverter side, and the diode with model APT40DQ120BG (1200 V/40 A) is selected as the rectifier tube on the rectifier side.
- 3.
Design of DC isolating capacitor;
The calculation formula of the isolation capacitance is shown in Equation (16), in which the voltage drop of the isolation capacitance is taken as
Vcbp = 10%
Vin, so the calculated capacitance value is 4.4 μF. In practical application, two 2.2 μF capacitors are selected in parallel to improve the current carrying capacity.
5.2. Analysis of Experimental Results
- 4.
Load mutation test;
When the output voltage is 900 V and the load changes from 2000 Ω to 6000 Ω, the comparison of voltage and current under the two controllers is shown in
Figure 15 and
Figure 16, and the statistical table of the experimental results is shown in
Table 5.
It can be seen that when the load current changes from 0.45 A to 0.15 A, the output voltage of the double closed-loop PI controller increases by 39 V, and the reference output is tracked within 38 ms. The output voltage of the LADRC controller increases by 20 V and converges within 20 ms.
When the output voltage is 900 V, the load resistance changes from 6000 Ω to 1500 Ω. A comparison of voltage and current under the two controllers is shown in
Figure 17 and
Figure 18. Data statistics of the sudden-increased load experiment results are shown in
Table 6.
It can be seen that when the load current changes from 0.15 A to 0.6 A, the output voltage of the double closed-loop PI controller drops 40 V, and the reference output voltage is restored after 32.4 ms, and the adjustment time is relatively slow. The output voltage of the LADRC controller dropped by 30 V and recovered the reference output voltage after 17 ms. After the suddenly increased loading, the LADRC controller has a stronger ability to suppress voltage sags and faster adjustment time, which coincides with the advantages of the LADRC controller. It can estimate the load disturbance and compensate it to improve the anti-interference ability of the system.
- 5.
Dual mode switching experiment;
The input voltage is 80 V and the load resistance is 2000 Ω. The output voltage is switched from 300 V to 1100 V, that is, the parallel mode is switched to series mode. Output voltages of the two controllers are shown in
Figure 19,
Figure 20,
Figure 21 and
Figure 22. Data statistics of the experimental results of dual-mode switching are shown in
Table 7 and
Table 8.
Through comparison, it can be found that when the double closed-loop PI controller is switched from parallel mode to series mode, some jitter occurs at the switching point, and the adjustment time is relatively slow. The whole switching time is 64.8 ms and 78 ms. However, when the LADRC controller is switching between two modes, not only does no jitter occur, but also the adjustment time is very fast (21 ms and 74 ms), which realizes the smooth switching between the two modes. It can be seen that the system still has strong adaptability when the internal parameters change. LADRC reduces the uncertain factors acting on the controlled object to the unknown disturbance, and the method of estimating and compensating the input and output data through the extended observer has high robustness.
- 6.
Soft switching and efficiency test;
Switching loss is one of the main factors affecting the system efficiency. In order to maximize the system efficiency, ZVS soft switching is implemented in the phase-shifting mode in this paper. The soft switching experimental waveform is shown in
Figure 23. The efficiency test was also conducted in this paper. As shown in
Figure 24, the efficiency of the system when it works in the duty cycle mode is low, mainly because soft switching is not realized in the duty cycle mode, and the losses of switches and transformers are large. With the increase of the output power of the power supply, the system switches to the phase-shift mode and realizes ZVS, and the efficiency of the power supply increases.