Power Hardware-in-the-Loop for Electrical Systems: From Research Experience to Guidelines for Industrial Testing

Power Hardware-In-the-Loop (PHIL) testing is a powerful approach that combines the flexibility of numerical simulations with the high fidelity of hardware tests to allow experimental validation of electrical equipment in a close-to-reality laboratory environment. This is enabled by using specially designed software and hardware that serve as an interface between the modeled environment and the equipment under test. Using PHIL for testing and validation can help significantly reduce time-to-market for novel energy solutions by both reducing the number of design/prototyping iterations, which in turn reduces the development costs, and the need for timely and costly field tests later during the system validation stage. The PHIL as a technology has been studied over the last 20 years, focusing mostly on the software/hardware interfaces and on system stability challenges. However, there has not been a consensus yet on how a PHIL system should be designed, validated and operated to maximize its benefits. The present work provides answers to these questions. Starting from the existing research experience and use cases, the present paper introduces practical guidelines for PHIL modeling, design, laboratory implementation and validation, and it identifies a few remaining open topics that need to be addressed to enable wider adoption of PHIL for testing and validation of electrical equipment in industrial environments.