A Reconfigurable and Flexible Experimental Footprint for Control Validation in Power Electronics and Power Systems Research

This paper introduces a reconfigurable and flexible experimental footprint for validation of new development in power electronics and power systems research. The system contains six drives with six diode rectifiers, and six IGBT converters, which can be reconfigured as back to back converter or diode rectifier drive systems. The induction motor (IM) and the permanent magnetic synchronous motor (PMSM) in this system provide a platform for research on motor control, fault detection, and diagnosis (FDD), etc. The two thyrisor dc drives with two dc motors work as loads for IM and PMSM. The dc drives also work as nonlinear loads to support research on power quality. Together with the configured diode rectifier drives, one adjustable nonlinear load offers a platform for development of power quality control algorithms. Additionally, the system interacts with real time digital simulator (RTDS^reg) for control algorithm verification in controller hardware in the loop (HIL) or power HIL tests. Hence, the entire system is flexible and reconfigurable for different research areas, e.g. motor control, FDD, active filtering, STATCOM and other power electronics or power system research. Three examples are presented in the area of FDD, STATCOM, and power quality to demonstrate the capability of this experimental footprint.