IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2021 - 25

Controller
Real-Time Simulator
CTRL SW Development
*Converter Specifications
* Design Calculations
* Offline Simulations
* etc...
* Controller Tuning
* State Machine Testing
* Protection Testing
* etc...
Parallel Activities
HW Development
* Electrical Design
* Mechanical Design
* Power Tests
* etc...
Converter Testing
Ready for
Operation
Start
R&D Time
FIG 1 Technical steps in the realization of an arbitrary converter. An amenity provided by the HIL systems lies in the possibility to
develop and test various control schemes simultaneously with the ongoing hardware design.
inputs (DIs), which might represent a challenge for smallscale
HILs (e.g., Typhoon HIL, RT Box, SpeedGoat, StarSim,
etc.). Such a technical hurdle can be circumvented through a
suitable sectioning of the converter model allowing it to run
on multiple HIL units, which is the subject being addressed
in the following paragraphs. It should be stressed beforehand
that large-scale simulators (e.g., RTDS, Opal RT, dSPACE),
typically used in the power systems domain, also exist, however,
this work relies on the use of their small-scale counterparts
typically designed for power electronics applications.
This article describes how the digital twin of a system
being as large as the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)
[1], depicted in Figure 2, can be realized by means of the
small-scale HIL units. Seven RT Box 1 [2] units, shown in Figure
(3), were employed to run the model of a 3.3kVac/5kVdc,
250kVAr MMC comprising 48 full-bridge cells and operating
in the rectifier mode. The developed digital twin was verified
against an industrial ABB PEC800 controller, while all
the steps in the system realization are supported by a thorough
set of discussions, making the presented procedure
extendable to other converters (e.g., Matrix MMC [3] or
Δ-STATCOM [4]) used in the medium/high voltage domain.
MMC Modeling Suitable for Real-Time Simulations
and the Need for Model Separation
As depicted in Figure 2, the MMC comprises a series connection
of switching stages, referred to as the submodules
(SMs) or cells. SMs are normally found in Half-Bridge (HB)
or Full-Bridge (FB) configuration, while the other choices
were listed in [5], [6]. A series connection of an SM cluster
and an inductor is referred to as the branch, whereas two
branches form the leg. By stacking the SMs in series, theoretically
unlimited voltage scalability is provided while current
capacity increase can be achieved in several ways, as
already discussed in [7], [8]. Despite the above mentioned
advantages, series connection of SMs comprises a high
iDC
P
+
iA
iB
iC
Lbr
A
B
C
VDC
SM Branch
FIG 2 MMC and the adopted naming convention.
June 2021 z IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE 25
Leg
N

IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2021

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IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2021 - Cover2
IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2021 - Contents
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