Thermal-HIL Real-Time Testing Platform for Evaluating Cooling Systems of Power Rectifiers

In this paper, a novel Thermal-Hardware-in-the-Loop (T-HIL) cooling system evaluating platform is proposed. The platform consists of a physical cooling system, which is used to be evaluated or characterized, hardware-software interfaces, and real-time simulation models for a power semiconductor. The hardware and software are connected and interacted in real-time. Thus, the platform can test the dynamic performance of the physical cooling system by inputting minimum energy. The power semiconductor is modeled in a software environment, and it is easy to change types of power semiconductors. It can effectively reduce R&D costs and provide a safe testing environment for engineers to evaluate or characterize cooling systems. The individual components in the proposed T-HIL system are studied and experimentally verified by the T-HIL system prototype. Moreover, the overall system evaluation results show that the proposed system can simulate power semiconductor losses and has good agreement with the theoretical findings.