Power Electronic Circuits Design: A Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

The development of power electronics results in a growing need for automatic design and optimization for power electronic circuits (PECs). This paper presents a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach for the PECs design. The optimization problem is divided into two processes using a decoupled technique and PSO is employed to optimize the values of the circuit components in the power conversion stage (PCS) and the feedback network (FN), respectively. A simple mutation operator is also incorporated into PSO to enhance the population diversity. The algorithm is applied to the optimization of a buck regulator for meeting requirements under large-signal changes and at steady state. Compared with genetic algorithm (GA), PSO can yield more optimized values of circuit components with lower computational effort.