Subtleties in the averaging of a class of hybrid systems with applications to power converters

High-frequency dither signals are commonly used to implement modulation schemes in power electronics converters. These systems represent an interesting class of hybrid systems with external excitation. They have a rich dynamical behavior, which cannot be easily understood intuitively. Despite the common use of averaging techniques in power electronics, it was only recently proved that a dithered hybrid system can be approximated by an averaged system under certain conditions on the dither signal. Averaging and averaged models for various types of power converters are analyzed in the paper. It is shown that the averaged nonlinearity depends on the dither shape and that dither signals with Lipschitz-continuous averaged nonlinearities can be used to adapt the equivalent gain of power converters. Practical stability of the original dithered system can be inferred by analyzing a simpler averaged system. The main contribution of the paper is to show that the averaged and the dithered systems may have drastically different behavior if the assumptions of the recently developed averaging theory for dithered hybrid systems are violated. Several practical experiments and simulation examples of power electronics converters are discussed. They indicate that the conditions on the dither signal imposed by the averaging theory are rather tight.