Digital Twin of an ANPC inverter with integrated Design-For-Trust

Abstract

Reducing costs and increasing manufacturing output while creating reliable products are three essential components needed to keep a business competitive. In the past, having an asset that could address these three challenges at the same time would be challeging. However, recent advances in computer processing capabilities coupled with increases to network speeds allowed such a system to become possible; and this is known as a Digital Twin (DT), which represents a virtual copy of a production system or a product. This work exhibits a DT application of an Active Neutral Point Clamped (ANPC) inverter using a controller. The controller emulates the ANPC responses of a new Digital Signal Processing (DSP) firmware and validates this new firmware by using Design-For-Trust (DFTr) characteristics. If the new firmware is malicious, then it should be rejected, thus adding preemptive protection measures for inverter based distributed energy resources.