FSU’s Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed Is a Valuable FREEDM-wide Community Resource
The Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed (HIL-TB) at Florida State University (FSU), a member of the NSF-funded Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems Engineering Research Center (ERC), headquartered at North Carolina State University, has quickly become a central hub of activity for Center researchers from all partner institutions.
The Centerhas begun significant enhancements of the HIL-TB through a Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The upgrades will enable the HIL-TB to be used for testing and demonstrating advanced distributed control for shipboard power systems.
The FSU system, located at the university’s Center for Advanced Power Systems (CAPS), has been used to validate numerous projects within the FREEDM Community. Partner institutions have used the HIL-TB for Controller Hardware-in-the-Loop (CHIL), and Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) development, and through hardware testing of the Gen II solid state transformer (SST), as well as for fault isolation devices (FIDs) that detect when and where a fault has occurred in a power system.
The testbed is now expanding to encompass a multi SST/FID medium voltage test environment. This past year, an impedance-based stability criterion was established for Dual Active Bridge (DAB) stages of SST.
The system has become invaluable due to the collaborative efforts of the team at FSU and the ease of using the system remotely to gain valuable research results.
