A Power Electronics-based Power HIL Real Time Simulation Platform for Evaluating PV-BES Converters on DC Microgrids

This paper presents a power hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) testbed using RTDS
^TM
real-time simulator, suitable for testing a DC-coupled photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage (BES) system on scalable DC microgrids. The testbed comprises a PHIL-based PV emulator and a PHIL-based DC grid emulator to mimic the PV panel response and DC grid response. Having two PHIL simulations would enhance the flexibility of the testbed compared to standalone source emulators. The power amplifiers (PAs) of both PHIL simulations are implemented with a half-bridge converter with a two-stage LC filter. An advanced boundary control algorithm is utilized to extend the bandwidth of switched-mode PA and robustness against constant power loads. The PHIL testbed system architecture, including the implementation of the power interface for both PHIL simulations, is described in detail. Finally, an experimental PHIL platform is developed to evaluate PV-BES power module performance on a fully decentralized DC microgrid.