Experimental Verification of Half-Duplex Power Packet Transmission

Abstract

Energy management systems are necessary in off-grid direct current (DC) power systems such as electric vehicles and DC microgrids to manipulate their distributed power sources. The system is tightly connected to the communication system between elements. In this sense, the energy management system is recognized as one of the cyber-physical systems. Power (or energy) packet and its dispatching system is also a cyber-physical approach to the DC system. The concept of power packet is tracing the packets in information networks. A power packet consists of a unit of DC power and the information tag which is attached to the power as voltage waveforms. The power flow has been numerically studied in power packet dispatching network. However, its characteristics and limitations are still unknown from the practical point of view. This paper experimentally verifies the half-duplex power packet transmission. The half-duplex transmission is one of the ways to transfer packets bidirectionally. The results showed that the half-duplex power packet transmission can be achieved in an experimental system with a MAC protocol as the information network. The results clarify that the communication system design may help the power system design.