Battery Emulation Using Dual-Active Bridge Converter

Abstract

A Battery Emulator(BE) is a platform that can mimic the behavior of an actual battery in real-time. In a typical BE system, a discretized battery model running on a digital platform controls a power interface hardware capable of transferring power to a device connected to it. These types of systems play a key role in enhancing the test benches for applications like the integration of renewable energy resources(RES) to the grid, electric vehicles(EV), battery management systems(BMS), etc. Unlike the testing with real batteries, testing with a battery emulator gives a low cost, safe, repeatable and reliable platform to the developer engineers around the world. This work presents a battery emulator based on a dual active bridge(DAB) along with an equivalent circuit based battery model capable of giving both static and dynamic response. Proposed work consists of an ac grid-connected converter system along with a battery model and dual active bridge to emulate both discharging and charging mode behavior. Corresponding simulation and hardware results are given and discussed.