A Novel Cost Effective and Highly Dynamic Power Hardware in the Loop (PHIL) System for Automotive Traction Inverter Testing

This paper presents a novel low-cost and highperformance Power Hardware in the Loop (PHIL) test system for electric motor emulation and automotive traction inverter testing. The proposed PHIL test setup utilizes a simple back-toback configuration with a shared DC link, eliminating the need for a full-power voltage source or additional DC/DC converter. Furthermore, no multiphase multilevel converter or increased switching frequency is required. Thus, it greatly reduces the overall system cost and space consumption. The primary innovation lies in a new control methodology that ensures stability, accuracy, and high dynamic response. It guarantees high performance despite the low-cost setup. With a real-time motor model running at 5 MHz on an FPGA, the PHIL test bench can emulate an arbitrary PMSM with nonlinear characteristics including saturation and cross saturation. Full-power tests for both stationary and transient operation states have been conducted. Experimental results prove the feasibility as well as the outstanding performance of the proposed PHIL test system.