A Cost-Effective Hardware in the Loop Implementation of Dual Active Bridge for Fast Prototyping of Electric Vehicles Charging Controls

The paper deals with the implementation of a cost-effective FPGA-based real-time simulator, including the dual active bridge converter and the energy storage system models, which is devoted to testing of control designs for battery charger power systems. The main goal of the proposed implementation is to provide a compact and modular solution allowing a fast prototyping with limited hardware and computational resources, which leads to reduce the development costs and times. The modeling of the power converter and storage unit for this real-time application is discussed in this paper, and the detailed experimental setup for HIL is provided. Experimental tests carried out by comparing the proposed hardware in the loop real-time implementation and the offline modeling, confirm satisfying performances in terms of accuracy and latency. This paper even highlights technical challenges that need specific attention as well as ongoing actions and further research direction.