New-Tech Europe Magazine | May 2018

the devices are even installed at the microgrid site or into a ship. Improve your products with HIL Ultimately, HIL allows engineers to automate collection of thousands of data point and assess the behavior of their control software in every operational scenario imaginable, but in the safety of real-time emulated power, without complicated procedures, high costs and hazards inherent to testing with real power. From the point of customers, HIL leads to better products, because engineers can find and fix bugs that no one has previously even been aware of. From the point of manufacturers, HIL makes product development more efficient, simplifies regression testing and also streamlines in-house certification processes for diverse existing and emerging standards, making sure that the product is not restricted to a single geographical market. Bottom-line of using HIL: lower OPEX When the aforementioned benefits of HIL are taken together and analyzed from the financial and managerial point of view, the introduction of HIL methodology is sure to significantly lower OPEX (Fig 2). More specifically, enhanced test coverage means that bugs and issues are identified early in the product development cycle, so that there are no costly urgent fixes or recalls. Streamlined product certification means that the product can be sent to the certification body with full confidence that it will get certified in the first attempt, without expensive, prolonged certification processes in multiple attempts. Paired with automated, unattended testing, these HIL benefits do not only lower the R&D costs, but also lower the support costs as the products are inherently better and more optimized. In sum, lower OPEX, in the case of HIL, also leads to better customer satisfaction and makes globalization of products easier.

Figure 3: Vertically integrated HIL systems from Typhoon HIL: turn-key software and hardware solutions devoid of complexities of integrating third- party components into a testbed

Are all HIL testbeds the same? To reap all the benefits of the HIL methodology, engineers must have a proper HIL testbed. Despite seemingly small differences among offerings from different manufacturers, not all HIL systems are the same. “The devil is in the detail”. The abovementioned gains of HIL methodology are available only from a HIL solution which is vertically integrated, scalable, customizable, and reliable in its performance. Vertical integration means that engineers should be able to immediately start using their HIL system without spending months troubleshooting interoperability issues among different components of a HIL system. To put it differently, vertical integration is possible when the entire HIL system, meaning hardware emulators and I/O docks and modeling and control software, is from the same vendor and offers a true turn-key user friendliness devoid of third-party

software and hardware complexities. Scalability means that a HIL system should be expandable, so that engineers can simply add additional HIL emulators when they go beyond testing individual controllers, and need to emulate complex systems such as feeder microgrids. Similarly, customizability implies that the HIL system can be modified to interface with any controller, providing a true black-box approach to testing. Finally, the HIL system should be reliable, in the sense that it should provide high- fidelity models of the power stage, be capable of achieving the same emulation timestep, e.g. 1 µs, for both simple and complex models, and be stable enough to run real-time emulation for hours, days, or even weeks, thus creating a viable alternative to prolonged periods of testing with real power and providing the benefits of lowering manufacturers’ OPEX. The only HIL systems in the market that fulfill or exceed these requirements are those by Typhoon HIL (Fig. 3).

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