BOOST CONVERTER IN MATLAB SIMULINK SOFTWARE

With Matlab/Simulink, you really need your other collaborators and clients to have Matlab/Simulink available, and that is an expensive proposition, especially being tied to yearly maintenance fees. One further advantage of Xcos is that it is much easier to share models, as it is easy to get access to the modelling environment. Perhaps Xcos is roughly 80-90% of the capability of Simulink/SimPowerSystems for my application, and good enough for what I need at this time. Simulink/SimPowerSystems has the most capability, yet Xcos is impressively capable, with more and more tools being published by their user community. Working inside the environments is pretty similar. Matlab has better user support as it is easier to call someone for help, but Scilab has a fair number of users posting problems and solutions, and with a bit of sleuthing, resolving my problem was not too difficult. In both cases I was able to get the packages running with some delay. With Scilab, I had to do internet searches for forum posts by other users with the similar problems. With Matlab, I was able to go back and forth with their helpful customer support to resolve the issue. I had difficulties getting both packages up and running on my Windows 7 computer as in both cases there were problems in getting external C compilers connected. There are some Xcos documentation and tutorials available, covering the most important topics.

BOOST CONVERTER IN MATLAB SIMULINK SOFTWARE

Simulink/SimPowerSystems has much better documentation, which is typical of commercial software vs open source software.

Simulink/SimPowerSystems has a more extensive library of predefined component or subsystem models than Xcos, yet Xcos has the most important components defined. An advantage of Scilab/Xcos is that the software is free. This raises the license price to about $12,000 USD plus further yearly license fees (~20%). To model the fuel cell power system in Matlab/Simulink requires the addon toolboxes SimPowerSystems and SimScape.