A Simple and Low-Cost HIL Solution for Control of Power Electronic Converters

Abstract

Power electronic converters play a crucial role in converting the available voltage to the required voltage ratings in both AC and DC. Generation of pulse width modulation (PWM) signals plays a crucial part in the overall working of a power electronic converter. The controlled PWM signals can effectively regulate the converter output according to the user requirement. So, supplying these PWM signals is the prime focus in the entire converter design. These PWM signals can be generated through hardware controller boards such as FPGA and microcontroller, or through software and hardware co-simulation platforms such as hardware in the loop (HIL) environment. However, direct hardware controller-based PWM generation needs thorough expertise on relevant programming languages. So, HIL solutions are normally preferred over this. There are many HIL simulators available such as Typhoon-HIL, RTDS, eMEGAsim, dSPACE, HRTSim, and RT-Lab, which serves the purpose. However, the cost of these simulators and the design complexity may limit their usage for research works conducted in academic institutions. With this intent, this paper suggests a low-cost HIL setup which requires data acquisition (DAQ) board and MATLAB/Simulink software to develop. The usefulness of the proposed HIL setup is validated by comparing with the actual results produced by the simulation environment and found it as satisfactory.KeywordsHardware in the loop (HIL) setupPower electronics’ controlStep-down converterPulse width modulation