Pre-Evaluation of Grid Code Compliance for Power Electronics Inverter Systems in Low-Voltage Smart Grids

This paper describes the application of controller hardware-in-the-loop (C-HIL) methods within an integrated design framework consisting of power electronics hardware, controller board and software, and high level management system where the grid code compliance of Smart Grid converter systems is pre-evaluated. This framework is used to evaluate a distributed energy resource (DER) converter design to grid code compliance prior to full hardware implementation. The advantage of this approach is that software errors can be identified earlier in the design process, thereby reducing the time to market.