Power-hardware-in-the-loop approach for emulating an offshore wind farm connected with a VSC-based HVDC

The real-world interaction of an offshore wind farm with an HVDC is complex due issues such as noise, randomness of event timings, and hardware design issues that are not well explored. Numerical simulations are widely accepted and cost effective tool to test a wide variety of different cases, however, the fidelity of the results is difficult to assess. Higher fidelity can be obtained with scale-down experiments, however, this solution has a limited test coverage. The power-hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) option offers a good trade-off between test fidelity and test coverage. The hardware part allows a high fidelity of the results whereas, the software simulation part allows an extensive study of different cases at a reasonable cost. This paper presents a PHIL implementation of an offshore wind farm connected with a voltage source converter (VSC)-based HVDC. The offshore wind farm is emulated in a real time simulation environment, and a grid emulator is used as power interface between the emulated system and the hardware system, i.e. VSC-based HVDC substation. The interaction of real time models and hardware is demonstrated with experimental results.