Electrical Circuits

Special Components for Power Electronic Circuits

IGCT with gate unit

PLECS takes an intuitive and highly efficient approach to modeling and simulating power electronic circuits with active, passive and electromechanical components.

Active Components

Rather than representing the physical details of a given power semiconductor, PLECS uses a simplified behavioral semiconductor model. At the core of such models is the ideal switch. It is either 'on' (short-circuited) or 'off' (open-circuited) and toggles between these positions instantaneously. Switching and conduction losses are accurately accounted for with multi-dimensional lookup tables based on manufacturer information or experimental measurements. This eliminates the need to exactly reproduce turn-on and turn-off waveforms, again and again, as the simulation proceeds. PLECS models with ideal switches run extremely fast and do not require any non-physical snubbers to ensure numerical stability.

Passive Components

PLECS provides a large library of passive components to model filters as well as parasitics and non-ideal characteristics of active components. Non-linear and time-variant resistors, inductors and capacitors are also supported. This allows a realistic representation of saturating components, as well as parameters dependent on other states such as temperature and mechanical position.

Also included in the passive components library are multiple transformer models in various ready-to-use configurations.

Electromechanical Components

A large collection of machine models serves as the interface between the electrical circuit and the mechanical domain and facilitates development of complex motor and motion control algorithms. All electric machine models are available for inspection and can be modified and extended.