Non-linear behavioural modelling of device-level transients for complex power electronic converter circuit hardware realisation on FPGA

Detailed device-level models of the insulated-gate-bipolar-transistor (IGBT) and diode are essential for power converter design evaluation for providing insight into circuit and device behaviours, as well as to shorten the design cycle and reduce costs. In this study, the non-linear behavioural models of IGBT and power diode are utilised for emulating the modular multilevel converter (MMC) on the field programmable gate array. For digital hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) emulation, these time-domain continuous models are discretised and linearised prior to being designed into the corresponding hardware modules using the hardware description language VHDL that features a fully paralleled and pipelined implementation. A circuit partitioning approach is adopted according to the MMC structure to enhance computation efficiency and then, detailed information from the system-level performance to the specific features of individual switches is available. HIL emulation and the subsequent comparison with results from the commercial off-line simulation tools prove that the complex IGBT and diode models can be involved in the efficient simulation of large-scale power converter