CCLIBS: The CERN Power Converter Control Libraries

Accurate control of power converters is a vital activity in large physics projects. Several different control scenarios may coexist, including regulation of a circuit’s voltage, current, or field strength within a magnet. Depending on the type of facility, a circuit’s reference value may be changed asynchronously or synchronously with other circuits. Synchronous changes may be on demand or under the control of a cyclic timing system. In other cases, the reference may be calculated in real-time by an outer regulation loop of some other quantity, such as the tune of the beam in a synchrotron. The power stage may be unipolar or bipolar in voltage and current. If it is unipolar in current, it may be used with a polarity switch. Depending on the design, the power stage may be controlled by a firing angle or PWM duty-cycle reference, or a voltage or current reference. All these cases are supported by the CERN Converter Control Libraries (CCLIBS). These open-source C libraries include advanced reference generation and regulation algorithms. This paper introduces the libraries and reviews their origins, current status and future.