Real-Time Hardware Emulation of Microgrid Forming Wireless Power Transfer Systems

The prevalence of wireless charging approaches has manifested a grid-supporting potential which can be evaluated by hardware-based methodologies. In this work, real-time emulation of a bidirectional wireless power transfer (WPT) system capable of dc microgrid formation is investigated on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Following a detailed analysis of the transfer characteristics of the dual-active bridge with a series-compensated resonant tank in between, a unified control scheme utilizing a phase-shift strategy is proposed for a flexible voltage or current regulation, thereby enabling the dc microgrid-forming capability. Electromagnetic transient modeling is then carried out so that an accurate digital emulation platform is feasible for prototyping. The fact that the WPT has a high frequency compels a small computation step size, which poses a dramatic challenge to real-time execution. A partition–iteration approach is therefore proposed for matrix dimension reduction which ultimately results in an alleviated processing burden. In the meantime, the parallelism of configurable logic blocks and the pipelined architecture of the FPGA are explored to achieve a low hardware latency. The analytical models, as well as the proposed control method, are validated experimentally, and then real-time hardware emulation of a dc microgrid consisting of WPT systems is performed for an integration study.