Digital emulator and observer of multicell converter

IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 2018

System-on-Chip (SoC) devices combine powerful general purpose processors, a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and other peripherals which make them very convenient for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation. One of the limitations of these devices is that control engineers are not particularly familiarized with FPGA programming, which need extensive expertise in order to code these highly sophisticated algorithms using Hardware Description Languages (HDL). Notwithstanding, there exist High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools which allow to program these devices using more generic programming languages such as C, C++ and SystemC. This paper evaluates SoC devices to implement a Modular Multi-Level Converter (MMC) model using HLS tools for being implemented in the FPGA fabric in order to perform HIL verification of control algorithms in a single low-cost device. Index Terms-System-on-Chip (SoC), Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), Modular Multi-level Converter (MMC), Real-Time Simulation (RTS), High-Level Synthesis (HLS), Zynq

ATZelektronik worldwide, 2014

As the comprehensive electrification of modern vehicles progresses, the traditional 12-V vehicle electrical system is constantly being extended with electrical subsystems. These function-specific subsystems are coupled via DC/DC converters. The control strategy in the associated electronic control unit (ECU) determines the energy flow between the different voltage levels, thereby performing a central role in energy management for the overall vehicle. As relatively new components, DC/DC converters present development engineers and tools with new challenges. This also applies to hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation, which is now an established step in the development of automotive electronic control units. This paper describes the challenges and presents an FPGA-based real-time simulation model of a DC/DC converter.

Electronics, 2022

This paper suggests the application of an embedded real-time simulator (eRTS) in the context of voltage–sensorless control of a modular multilevel power converter (MMC). This eRTS acts as an observer and ensures digital redundancy in the case of any fault occurring among the capacitor voltage sensors of the MMC submodules. Hence, in such a faulty situation, the MMC controller switches from the measured voltages to their estimated counterparts. As for the digital implementation, to ensure a high level of integration of the overall control system, the Xilinx Zynq-7020 system-on-chip field programmable gate array (SoC-FPGA) device was used. The controller was implemented in the hardwired ARM Cortex-A9 processor, with a 100 µs time step. Regarding the time-sensitive blocks (PWM, eRTS and measurements filtering), a full hardware implementation was privileged, using the FPGA fabric. The execution time of these blocks was 710 ns with a 100 MHz system clock, and the synchronization with the...

PSIM and MATLAB are the most commonly used software packages available for simulation of power electronic systems. The paper presents the simulation of power converters using a SimCoupler Module in MATLAB which provides the link between PSIM and MATLAB/Simulink for Software Simulation Integration (SSI) work. The power electronic system is implemented in PSIM for representing the system model, while the control circuit is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink in a complementary way, so significantly shortening the time to set up and simulate a system which includes electronic circuits. The important step in SSI technique is the time synchronization of the two independent software platforms that is used in this study PSIM and MATLAB/ Simulink. The availability of personal computers with fast microprocessors and ample RAM size makes SSI technique possible. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how to use the Simcoupler Module for a three-phase, multilevel inverter using model predictive strategy with resistive-inductive load (RL-Load). The paper explains the theoretical approach of the system model and then the simulation results are given in order to show the effectiveness of the system in the SSI arena. The output currents and DC-link capacitor voltages are sampled and predicted for the next sampling time for each valid switching state of the inverter. The error between the predicted and reference current values and also the error between the capacitor voltages with respect to the reference value are obtained to minimize the cost function by choosing the appropriate state's switching signals and then applied the control signals to the switches embedded in the converter under study. The co-simulation results show that the proposed control achieves high performance. As a result, applying SSI tools by using SimCoupler enhances the engineering design efficiency in power conversion studies.

IEEE open access journal of power and energy, 2021

Graduate Student Member, IEEE), LEVI M. BIEBER 1 (Graduate Student Member, IEEE), JARED PAULL 1 (Student Member, IEEE), LIWEI WANG 1 (Senior Member, IEEE), WEI LI 2 (Member, IEEE), AND JEAN-NICOLAS PAQUIN 2 (Senior Member, IEEE)

This paper presents a simulator for Power Electronic Converters. The simulator com bines simplified models of power devices with effective simulation techniques achieving accurate results with small computational effort. The simultaneous simulation of the con trol and the power part of the converter facilitates the design of the control Joops. The simulator has been programmed on C and runs on a Personal Computer. A friendly hu man interface has been developped allowing a capture of the schematícs and a graphical representation of the results.

International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering, 2019

Multilevel converters have been designed and implemented many decades ago in many countries around the word. However, in West Africa, these systems are difficult to implement because of lack of expertise and hardware which are usually very expensive. This paper proposes an implementation of an Embedded Switching Control Software (ESCS) code on Arduino 2560 hardware for multi-level systems using Model-Based Design (MBD) approach that Arduino 2560 control hardware platforms are low-cost system and locally available in many Africa countries. Thus, it can enable the validation of complex energy conversion systems using local components for research and education purposes. The paper provides detailed steps to reach such goals by proposing a Carrier Based Space Vector Pulse Wide Modulation (CB-SVPWM) for three-phase multi-level inverters. A simple model of CB-SVPWM is considered to automatically generate the ESCS code for a single-phase five-level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter then deployed on Arduino 2560 hardware conforming to On-Target Rapid Prototyping (OTRP) approach. The simulated and practical results confirm that MBD with Simulink offers a convenient approach to develop ESCS code for multi-level converters.

typhoon-rtds.ch

In this paper, we present the Typhoon Real Time Digital Simulation (T-RTDS) platform for highpower electronic systems, the fastest simulation platform of its kind. T-RTDS is based on novel simulation algorithms and proprietary high-throughput low-latency processor architecture. This approach enables simulation with a 1µs time-step, including input/output (I/O) latency. As a case study, we present modeling, simulation and experimental results for a system comprising a rectifier, an inverter, an output filter and a load.

Computational tool for modeling and simulation Matlab/Simulink is one of the program packages for simulation of electrical behaviour of power electronics circuits. Besides all its advantages, primarily its efficient numerical core, its shortcomings include graphically complex block schemes used in Simulink to create the simulation models. An additional drawback of this method of creating simulation models is knowledge of the basics of Matlab/Simulink software package. This paper describes an application developed in the Matlab/GUI environment that represents an interface between the user and the prepared base of simulation models of typical circuits of electronic converters. The user selects converter circuits from the base that are represented by usual electrical schemes. Element model parameters in the simulated schemes can be changed as well as conditions for progress of transient simulation. Upon completion of the simulation the simulated waveforms are shown in the same window a...

IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 2018

This paper evaluates the benefits of using a high-level synthesis (HLS) tool to develop FPGA-based real-time simulators for power electronics systems. The investigated workflow generates a synthesizable hardware description from a system level C-code along with a set of directives that specify performance criteria such as area utilization and timing closure requirements. The performance of the HLS approach is evaluated for different circuit sizes and target clock frequencies. Results show that HLS can be used for Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) applications when the circuit to be simulated is small and the target clock frequency is not too high (up to 100 MHz). For larger circuits and higher clock frequencies, HLS will either require a simulation time-step that is too large for real-time simulation purposes, or will tend to use almost all of the FPGA resources.