Fidelity of Control RT-HIL Tools: From Design to Commissioning of a Medium-Voltage Modular Multilevel Converter

This work presents the workflow and supporting tools used to realize a 500kW, ±10 kVdc MMC-based laboratory supply. Control Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop (RT-CHIL) simulations have played a key role in its development. In particular, a unique setup realized with small-scale CPU-based real-time computers and distributed simulation was extensively used. While previous works have already detailed this RT-CHIL setup and validated it against offline simulations, here, we go one step further and compare it to experimental results from the full-scale system. To conduct a finer analysis, we also present a flexible hardware test setup used during the converter's development. This allows a more thorough assessment of the real-time simulators by focusing on one sub-unit. Subsequently, we validate the full real-time simulations against experiments on the dual MMC-based supply. Throughout this article, we share insights into the development of one of the few projects of this magnitude in academia and discuss findings regarding the use of RT-CHIL simulation. The results confirm the flexibility and importance of RT-CHIL tools in de-risking the converter control deployment.