Series-Connected Power Electronics as a Communication Medium

Current power line communications consist of a voltage mode based communications protocol that is effective for communication between devices connected in parallel. Recently, advances in power electronics have facilitated a series connection scheme. In order to establish communications with these series connected power electronics, a current mode based means of communication needs to be established. In this paper, we present a methodology to use series connected power electronics as a communications medium for a current mode based means of power line communications. We contribute a model, generalized for all series connected power electronics, which establishes a foundation for part the first layer of the OSI model, the physical layer. This model is then analyzed in use of a physical system consisting of series connected inverters used in solar power conversion. The results show how a current based communication scheme can be implemented with the result in this paper being a low bandwidth communication. With future work of a complete establishment of the physical layer, the traditional power line communication protocols, such as G3 or Prime, can then be utilized for upper layers of communication.