A Hardware Framework for Three-Phase Converter Physical Modeling

A low-cost voltage source inverter (VSI) module for building a laboratory testbed for experimental research works with 3-phase 3-wire networks with line-to-line voltage up to 250 VAC is presented. The module consists of a 3-phase 600 V 10 A IGBT bridge controlled by a 32-bit ARM microcontroller. The module also contains 2 galvanically-isolated UART communication ports; 4 current measurement channels and 5 voltage measurement channels. The module functionality is sufficient to perform experiments with many VSI applications, such as: variable frequency drive (VFD); regulated AC/DC voltage source; 1-phase voltage regulator; active rectifier; 1-phase grid-tie inverter; parallel or series active power filter etc. Furthermore, by combining two modules, it becomes possible to implement electronic load with variable parameters; four-quadrant VFD; unified power quality conditioner etc. The onboard communication ports allow to implement data exchange either between modules and/or between module and PC for data processing and storage. The usage of such VSI modules in educational purposes will allow to implement many laboratory experiments in the fields of electric drive, power converters, electric power quality, etc.