Implementation of an FPGA-based Real-Time Emulator for the Rapid Validation of Power Electronics System in Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle

Power electronics system (PES) is an essential part of the fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV), which controls the electricity from the power supplies to the electric equipment. It usually consists of the DC-DC boost converter, the motor drive inverter, and the bi-directional boost-buck converter. In this paper, an FPGA-based real-time emulator is developed for the rapid validation of the FCEV PES performance. The involved power electronics circuits are modeled and solved in a paralleled structure, which makes full advantages of the FPGA parallelism. The computational latency can be reduced to an ultra-low 50ns after its real-time implementation on the National Instrument FlexRio NI-7975R FPGA module. The accuracy of the developed real-time emulator is proved by comparing the FPGA-based simulation results with the offline simulation tool, and the effectiveness is then validated by the real-time simulation on the NI FPGA-based real-time platform.