FPGA-Based Device-Level Electro-Thermal Modeling of Floating Interleaved Boost Converter for Fuel Cell Hardware-in-the-Loop Applications

Floating interleaved boost converter (FIBC) is a promising topology of the dc/dc converters to interface the fuel cell with dc bus in a hybrid powertrain. For the efficient control development of power converters, the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation plays an important role. The accuracy of the real-time model determines the credibility of the HIL simulation. In order to take the power losses and thermal stress into account in the control development, the device-level real-time model is becoming popular in recent years, which can effectively produce device transient voltage and current waveforms, switching power dissipations, and thermal behaviors. In this paper, a device-level electro-thermal model of FIBC is proposed and developed using the field programmable gate array based real-time simulation technology. The FIBC network model can effectively be simulated with a 500-ns time step while producing the insulated-gate bipolar transistor transient switching waveforms authentically with a 5-ns resolution. The switching power losses can thus be estimated in real time and then used for the computation of the IGBT thermal behavior. Therefore, the device junction temperature can be evaluated in the real-time simulation. The accuracy of the proposed FIBC device-level model is validated by the reference model in the Saber offline simulation tool. At last, an embedded PI controller of FIBC is employed in the real-time experiments to verify the effectiveness of the developed model.