A Real Time Simulator of a PEV's On Board Battery Charger

This paper presents an FPGA based real time (RT) simulator for a Plug in Electrical Vehicle”s (PEV) on board battery charger. Common values for the switching frequencies of the AC-DC and DC-DC stages range between tens of kilohertz to hundreds of kilohertz, so the design effort aimed obtaining a very small time step in order to account for the switching effects. By taking advantage of the parallel structure of the FPGA and using Xilinx's Vivado High Level Synthesis tool, a time step of 40ns was obtained. The RT simulator was validated through simulation means and experimentally on a custom ZYNQ based board. The purpose of the developed intellectual property (IP) is to reduce the development cost and time of the charger's control system with the aid of hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations.