Alternative hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) setups for real-time simulation and testing of microgrids

Abstract

The fruitfulness of the microgrids' installation depend upon the design of effective control system that can commendably handle various uncertainties such as renewable energy intermittencies, dynamic variations of nonlinear/reactive loads, disturbances during connect/disconnect with utility grid, faults, inverter failures, etc. There are many simulation tools available for microgrid modeling and testing its controllers before the actual system is deployed. Howbeit, for best validation, it is always recommended to test in a real-time rather than in simulation. But, testing with real equipment is not affordable for research purpose. Further, many real-time simulators such as RTDS, RT-Lab, eMEGAsim, Typhoon-HIL, HRTSim, dSPACE, etc., brought a concept called hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) setup, that possess the advantages of both simulation and experiment. However, all these existing HIL setups are still expensive to use them for the research conducting in academic institutions. With this intent, this paper suggests some alternative and low cost HIL setups with COTS units usually available in laboratories of academic institutions such as MATLAB, LabVIEW, PLC, RTU, SCADA to simulate and test the microgrids in real-time.