Methods for Improving Power and Bandwidth of Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbenches

The integration of renewable energy into the electric grid is increasing the use of complex power grid systems. These systems need to be tested in order to guarantee a reliable and secure operation of the grid. A promising test technique to verify and validate these systems is Power Hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL), which can reproduce the desired working environment as closely as possible to real world conditions. However, the reduced bandwidth of the PHIL testbenches limit the accuracy of the experiments and can cause instability issues that compromise the test. In this paper, a characterization and analysis of the complete closed-loop block diagram of a PHIL test is made. After that, different methods are set forth and described to increase the bandwidth and power of the current PHIL testbenches.