Development of Hybrid AC/DC Laboratory-scale Smart Microgrid Testbed with Control & Monitoring System Implementation in LabVIEW

This paper presents a hybrid AC/DC microgrid testbed which uses a mixture of emulators and industrial hardware to model a real-world environment for renewable energy systems at laboratory scale. The testbed description is detailed with reference to its components, system architecture and Human-Machine Interface (HMI). Testbed components include grid and PV emulators, programmable loads, and multiple power electronic converters connected in an AC/DC configuration. The system architecture is based on a hierarchical central control system implemented in LABVIEW, which integrates an intuitive HMI to enable supervisory control and data acquisition. It includes local and low-level control implementations for the PV emulator and programmable loads with the MPPT algorithm implemented at low power, using a single-stage inverter topology and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The proposed system offers a reconfigurable and flexible architecture with multiple communication protocols that enable the implementation of both high level to low-level microgrid control algorithms.