Real-Time FPGA-Based HIL Emulator of Power Electronics Controllers Using NI PXI for DFIG Studies

This article presents a high-performance hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system aimed to assist experts in developing and testing power electronics control board and their logic with real-time (RT) models of both electrical and mechanical components. For demonstrating the effectiveness of this system for HIL testing, a new industrial doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) control board is tested based on a comprehensive wind energy conversion model developed in MATLAB/Simulink hardware description language (HDL) coder and LabVIEW environment. The interaction between MATLAB/Simulink and LabVIEW is accomplished by National Instrument (NI) intellectual property (IP) integration node, which loads very high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHSIC-HDL or VHDL) codes (that enable those two software exchange RT data). LabVIEW implements a VHDL code of electrical model with fixed-point variables on an R-Series reconfigurable input/output (I/O) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) module on NI-PXIe 7858R installed on NI PXIe 1062Q chassis, and the mechanical models deployed in its PXIe 8133 central processing unit (CPU). Finally, through a uniquely developed interface board, the HIL emulator connects to an external DFIG control board. In FPGA, the model and other communicational and logging components’ step-time in each iteration is
$5.0~\mu \text{s}$
. For verifying the results, a comparison is made between the proposed emulator system and Typhoon HIL602+ as a commercially available HIL system. It is proven that there is little or no significant deviation between the outputs of two systems. The proposed HIL emulator does not have the limitation of commercial HIL systems in adding custom-made new components.