Hardware-in-the-loop testing of digital power controllers

Digital control technologies are becoming increasingly attractive to power electronics controls in managing many power conversion systems due to many advantages over analog controls. Final construction of aerospace power systems is extremely costly while traditional software-only simulation is often insufficient to exactly capture the control dynamics. One way to bridge the gap between simulation and final system construction is real-time hardware-in-the-loop (RT-HIL) testing, which increases the realism of the simulation and provides access to hardware features currently not available in the software-only simulation. In this paper, we develop a digital power controller for aerospace applications and validate the design through hardware-in-the-loop testing using Virtual Test Bed Real-Time (VTB-RT). The VTB-RT provides a low-cost, multi-solver, multi-platform tool for RT-HIL testing. Prior to the final system construction, the RT-HIL platform provides an approach to test the actual control software running on a dedicated processor with a virtual prototype of the power conversion system, where the VTB-RT platform models the power conversion system while the code generated for the digital control system runs on the real control hardware. The design procedure with the VTB-RT is first reviewed. The testing results are given and analyzed in the paper.