After completing his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the University of Tehran, Mahdi Tude Ranjbar received his Master’s degree in Power Electronics from Queens University. He has been using PSIM since 2018 but most recently he had utilized the simulation software at Queen’s University ePOWER Center.
“I used PSIM to simulate a power electronic system that I used for my thesis which was focused on a novel MPPT algorithm. I utilized PSIM to derive the frequency response and transient response of my converter and to design a controller for it.
PSIM has a good and easy-to-use solver which does not require a lot of settings to make it converge. That is very good about it. Also having both digital and analog modules and in more advanced packages HDL support is very useful for the designers.
I used the renewable energy library of PSIM and it has a very easy and convenient to use set of components. The fact that it provides different levels of modeling for more accuracy and more speed is very useful. I was trying to design an MPPT converter, and I did not want to go through all the detail of the solar panel, so I used the simple solar panel model which calculated the curve with only 4 parameters.
I also really enjoyed working with the C block component. It comes with the basic package of PSIM and I used it to simulate the operation of a microcontroller with a digital filter. Using this block, I could easily implement sampling and processing of behavioral functionality.
I also used PSIM for describing state machines which are very hard to design without this block. It can be implemented with logic gates and counters but it is very hard to maintain.
I must appreciate the number of control components that are provided in this software. I think the control menu is one of the biggest menus in this software and it has everything from digital and analog filters to arithmetic and signal conditioning blocks.”