An Effective Power Hardware-in-the-Loop System for the Simulation Testing of an Energy Management System of a Nearly Zero Energy Building Microgrid

This paper proposes a laboratory test environment for evaluating the performance of a nearly zero energy building (nZEB) microgrid using power-hardware-in-the-loop (PHiL) simulation. The laboratory set up consists of a lithiumion battery array of 10kWh, a renewable energy sources power emulator (RESPE), intelligent meters (i-meter), intelligent plugs (i-plugs) and intelligent links (i-links) as well as controllable and uncontrollable loads. A cost-effective, low complexity RESPE is proposed based on the use of two induction machines. Each power node of the microgrid is monitored by an i-meter, while each load is operated by an i-plug. The i-links devices provide the connection of the system remotely with other devices based on different communication protocols such as Modbus and CAN Bus. A centralized master controller is responsible for the microgrid operation collecting information from the battery inverter, the i-plugs and the i-meters. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed laboratory environment, an electric energy management algorithm based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is used. Several experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed laboratory test environment.