A Network Analysis Modeling Method of the Power Electronic Converter for Hardware-in-the-Loop Application

The application of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in the hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HiLs) has enabled the time step reaching the range of hundreds of nanoseconds. However, the time performance of FPGA-based real-time simulation remains to be improved. In this article, a network analysis modeling method for FPGA-based real-time simulation of the power electronic converter is proposed. An ideal switching network unit, without requiring a large amount of memory, is used to determine the topology of the circuit and solve interface voltages/currents from the torn circuit. A parallel integration method is then implemented to obtain the status of the circuit element. At last, a diode-clamped three-level voltage source converter is used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. A 40-ns simulation step is finally achieved on the National Instruments (NI) FlexRIO PXIe-7975 platform. The accuracy of the proposed method is also verified against the results from MATLAB/Simulink.