Rapid prototyping tool for electrical load emulation using power electronic converters

Real-time control systems are relying increasingly on digital discrete-time implementations instead of analog continuous implementations. The foremost challenge in a real-time system is to perform computations within very stringent time frames. Power electronics control system is such a real-time system. This work is concerned with the issues of emulating different electrical loads using power electronic converters. A real-time circuit simulator has been designed to emulate loads at significant power levels. In this work the load model is defined using open source circuit simulator as a front-end interface and a DSP-FPGA platform to emulate them in the back-end. This paper presents requirements of real time control systems and describes the digital hardware structure for a load emulator. In order to highlight the performance of the proposed system, experimental results of virtual load (three phase induction motor) are reported.