HIL in Power Electronics
Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for Power Electronics systems is the next quantum leap in the evolution of HIL technologies. The ability to design and automatically test power electronics systems with HIL simulations will reduce development cycle, increase efficiency, improve reliability and safety of these systems for large number of applications. Indeed, power electronics is an enabling technology for hybrid electric vehicles, electric vehicles, variable speed wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, industry automation, electric trains etc. There are a least three strong reasons for using hardware-in-the-loop simulation for power electronics, namely:
- reduction of development cycle,
- demand to extensively test control hardware and software in order to meet safety and quality requirements, and
- need to prevent costly and dangerous failures.
The question is why are power electronics systems so different considering that HIL has been used in aerospace and automotive applications for decades? Power electronics systems are a class of dynamic systems that exhibit extremely fast dynamics due to high-frequency switching action of power electronics switches (e.g. IGBTs, MOSFETs, IGCTs, diodes etc.). Real-time simulations of switching transitions require digital processor speeds and latencies that can actually be met with off-the-shelf computer systems and with FPGA/CPU platform technologies making it 100 times faster than traditional computational methods to achieve high-resolution HIL for power electronics.
Read more about this topic: Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation
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