Versatile Power Electronics Teaching Setup

The goal of this work is to design, size, simulate, realize, test, validate and investigate an open and customised power electronics teaching setup platform that will be used by the power electronics laboratory of the EPFL for teaching purposes. The aforementioned system is made in order to be as modular as possible allowing to perform different converter topologies operations, exploiting the hardware and software potentialities of it and keeping all the safety requirements. In particular, using two converters (3 phase rectifier+ 3 phase inverter) from Hyundai and replacing all the control boards with an open and completely custom system interface from Perun technologies, it is possible to give the possibility to the user of programming in real time the DSPs with PLECS or Simulink C code generation tools interfacing the system directly to a personal computer. This way, there is the opportunity of running an initially wanted simulation in a physical environment, performing manoeuvres and experiments using the desired control technique in a real system for teaching or research objectives. For what concerns the hardware potentiality of the system, the user through a reconfiguration physical panel can decide which physical connections enable inside the system giving rise to the desired converter topology operation. Furthermore, in order to make the system more custom enabling several converter topologies, relevant electrical elements are added to the setup. Indeed, using AC and DC power supplies, an AC grid emulator, a motor load, two braking resistors, an LC filter, boost inductors and a precharge circuit the system potentialities become remarkably. It has to be underlined that the personal contribution of the candidate to this work is on the hardware and power components aforementioned above having the shrewdness of using a systematic and engineering approach covering all the design and prototyping steps. Moreover, the focus is also on the design and realization of some unique auxiliar measurement PCBs components such as a PCB safety light controller board and a GPIO collecting signals board. Once the system will be fully completed and tested 20 other models will be realized by a professional company based on the prototype and put in the lab.