Real-Time Simulation of a Fast Charger Using a Low-Cost FPGA Platform

Advances in semiconductor technologies bring to the market power electronic converters (PECs) switched at high frequencies, and make their real-time simulation and testing using a hardware-in-loop configuration difficult. Various approaches have been reported in the literature that demonstrate the feasibility of simulating high switching frequency (HSF) PECs in real-time, but require high-end devices. This paper demonstrates that low-cost FPGA platforms can be leveraged for the accurate real-time simulation of HSF of PEC. The proposed platforms make use of a solver that uses state variables from the previous time-point to determine the status of uncontrolled switches. The performance of the proposed approach is assessed using a battery charger test case. The paper demonstrates that the proposed method is latency- and resource-efficient, and achieves a time-step of 32 ns.