Biography:

Prof. Fei Gao serves as the Executive Director of Research, Doctoral Studies, and Innovation at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM) and is also a Full Professor at UTBM, France. He earned his PhD in Renewable Energy from UTBM in 2010, receiving the Distinguished Youth Doctor Award. Prof. Gao specializes in hydrogen fuel cells for transportation and digital twin technology in modern power electronics and energy systems. He is a Fellow of both IEEE and IET. He is the recipient of 2020 "IEEE J. David Irwin Early Career Award" from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 2022 "Leon-Nicolas Brillouin Award" from SEE France, and 2022 industrial "Sustainable Future Visionary Award" from Typhoon HIL. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Industrial Electronics Technology News, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification, and holds leadership roles in various IEEE societies, including Chair of the Award Committee and of the Constitution & Bylaws Committee of the IEEE Transportation Electrification Council, Vice-Chair of the Technical Committee on Electrified Transportation Systems of the IEEE Power Electronics Society and Vice-Chair of the Industrial Automation and Control Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society.

Abstract:

This presentation focuses on Real-time simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) techniques that emerge as indispensable tools in the design, modeling, testing and validation of modern power electronic systems. Different from an offline simulation, real-time simulation depends not only on the results of logical/arithmetic calculations of the model but also on physical time (real-time) when these results are produced. Today, high accuracy real-time simulation and HIL of modern power electronics is still a great challenge. Power electronics components models are characterized by their high switching frequency and on-off characteristics. Mathematical models that contain a number of power electronic components can lead to serious real-time simulation problems (e.g. limited simulation time step size, large memory to store circuit topology due to on-off states of power switches, etc.). Solve such mathematical models while meeting the strict time constraint requires the development of specific real-time simulation techniques. In this presentation, a general introduction of real-time simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) technology is firstly given. State-of-art modeling approaches for power electronic switches, as well as electric network formulations of power electronic systems are then presented, and their advantages and drawbacks are discussed with commercial solution examples. The main hardware implementation platforms (CPU and FPGA) for real-time simulation models are also compared. At last, a simple example about how to implement a Floating Interleaved Boost Converter (FIBC) model in real-time simulation platform for controller Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) application is provided using the previously presented techniques.