Reduced Scale PHIL Emulation Concepts Applied to Power Conversion Systems With Battery Storage

This article deals power hardware in the loop (PHIL) real-time simulation (also called emulation) of electric power conversion systems, especially the ones involving battery storage. A case study related to a wind turbine power conversion system hybridized with a lithium-ion battery illustrates the main concepts. A similitude reduction process is presented to scale the model parameters in order to fulfill the sizing of a reduced scale test bench allowing to achieve the PHIL real-time emulation. The original “time compression” concept is also reminded. However, the main contribution of this article is the comparison between two concepts of real-time emulated devices (RTED) depending on whether these concepts are based on a model (“model based” RTED) or on a physical image of the actual device (“image based” RTED). Advantages and drawbacks of both concepts are discussed based on experimental results.