Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator Based Triggering Pulse Generator for Single Phase Inverter

摘要

This paper presents a real-time hardware-in-the-loop(HIL) simulator based triggering pulse generation technique for firing power electronic switching elements including MOSFET and IGBT for single phase sinusoidal pulse width modulated (SPWM) inverter using Arduino microcontroller. In case of designing an inverter, triggering signal generation is necessary to fire the switching elements. The objective of this work is to generate gate pulse for triggering the switching element using real time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technique on MATLAB/Simulink environment. The logic block designed in MATLAB/Simulink is directly burned into Arduino's flash memory without using any kind of coding technique. Control blocks are created in MATLAB/Simulink while measurement signals from the hardware circuit are taken into MATLAB/Simulink through serial communication protocol of Arduino. PWM signals are generated by Arduino using MATLAB/Simulink and sent to a power electronic converter. Finally, to validate the proposed concept, a 1 kW laboratory prototype of single phase inverter is tested using the proposed triggering pulse generator. This method can be used to generate different types of pulse signals for various converter applications without programming complexity. Among all existing technique of triggering signal generation, the proposed technique is the cheapest and easiest to implement.