A New Low-cost Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Control of Power Electronics Systems Laboratory

Abstract

Laboratory is very important in engineering education but setting up a laboratory is related in a huge investment. Traditional laboratory also requires students to present at the laboratory. Since 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak prevents students from the onsite studying. The lecture class can be deficiently substitute by online class but the laboratory is heavily impacted and still has no good solution. A virtual laboratory or a low-cost hardware-in-the-loop can reduce the severity of the problem. This paper presents a new hardware-in-the-loop simulator for control of power electronics systems laboratory. The proposed system uses a low-cost analog I/O hardware to link the physical control signal to student’s PC and act as a virtual power electronics circuit simulator. As the PC is not the real-time high-performance simulator, the time-scaling technique is used. The result and discussion have shown that the developed system is very useful in many aspects.