VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF POWER CONVERTERS FOR USE IN FUTURE POWER SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES

Abstract

Electronics are more widely penetrating almost every area of society and as they do, the demand to supply them with regulated power increases considerably. The scale of the electronic power distribution systems needed ranges from those in very small handheld consumer electronic devices all the way up to those needed in large buildings, ships, and cities. The energy supplied within these power distribution systems can come from many different generation sources that operate either individually or simultaneously. When power electronics are controlled properly, simultaneous generation sources can be employed in a way that optimizes them according to the user’s desired parameters. Energy storage, especially lithium-ion batteries, has emerged as a viable candidate for backing up and buffering traditional generation sources. It is difficult, from both a cost and feasibility perspective, to setup and experimentally study large power systems employing distributed generation sources. Computer aided models can be employed reliability to study the many different configuration and control strategies. Before they can be properly employed, accurate device models must be available of all the different distributed sources, power vi electronic converters, and loads, respectively. Most of these devices are commercially procured and the vendors are rarely able and willing to supply all the proprietary circuit and control technologies needed to develop models of them at the component level. New strategies are needed to develop these computer aided models and to learn how to put them through a full verification and validation (V&V) procedure that ensures they meet the requirements needed to study these systems against all possible use cases. In the work presented here, a medium voltage (MV) AC/DC testbed has been designed, installed, and experimentally studied to emulate one zone of a zonal shipboard power system. The testbed has several different power generation sources, power electronic converters, and loads that are all being modeled and then put through a V&V procedure. The testbed, computer aided model development, and V&V process employed on several power electronic converters will be discussed here.