Power hardware-in-loop emulation of a battery for charging systems and grid applications

Relevance. Batteries are playing an increasingly vital role in power systems due to their utilization in various applications including microgrids, electric vehicles, sustaining geographically isolated communities, and energization of automated devices. Since they are considered as the enabling technology for renewable energy integration, the absence of battery systems from islanded microgrids can result in decreased system reliability and compromised performance due to the intermittency of local sources. Nevertheless, the hazardousness associated with their charging mechanism has led to the urgent continuous development of charging technologies and battery management systems. Aim. To develop a safe testbed to examine the functionality of newly produced battery charging stations and battery managers without employing actual physical batteries to avoid the hazardous manipulation of batteries and increase flexibility during the design and validation stage. This is accomplished by modeling the electrochemical dynamics of the battery system and integrating the device-under-test to a DC converter, which reacts based on these modeled dynamics. Novelty. This work adapts one of the most successful Li-ion battery models available in the literature and utilizes it to interact with power electronic devices that exchange power signals. Unlike other work in this field, the design is based on power hardware-in-loop principles and has minimized power consumption characteristics due to its unique configuration. The constructed computer model can be easily reparametrized to describe the dynamics of various battery capacities. Methods. MATLAB-based simulations of the proposed testbed were conducted for high and low power capacity. A LabView-based program was interfaced with the testbed hardware using a NI-DAQ board to validate the proposed design practically. The testbed hardware components were entirely developed from scratch for experimentation purposes. Results. The proposed testbed successfully imitated the dynamics of the battery, while the practical results concurred the simulated ones.