Rapid Prototyping Using The Smart Inverter Target Platform

The Smart Inverter Target Platform is a reusable, modular and fully programmable hardware platform for prototyping a wide variety of power electronics applications.

Interactive power electronics design

The Smart Inverter Target Platform enables power electronics engineers to rapidly develop and test new and innovative algorithms for power electronics control. With the Smart Inverter Target Platform, you can 

• design power electronics systems in an interactive manner:
  programming the Smart Inverter Target Platform is only a matter minutes. Moreover, the platform can be programmed by means of user-friendly tools like Matlab/Simulink. This leads to extremely short design and test cycles, minimizing time-to-hardware. Also, engineers can work in a very interactive way whereby new ideas, bug fixes and changes can be tested immediately on hardware.

• rapidly create custom hardware setups:
  Smart Inverters allow for the creation of a wide variety of custom hardware setups. As such, no time is lost in designing dedicated hardware. This saves an enormous amount of time, especially during the  prototyping stages of the design process. Smart Inverter hardware can be used to prototype applications like motor drives, power grid control, induction heating and lighting.

Software algorithms, ranging from vector and direct torque control to even more complex solutions, can be downloaded directly onto the Smart Inverter Target Platform. On the output side, the Smart Inverter is connected to the devices that need to be controlled, e.g. a motor or a power grid. It only takes a few minutes before everything is ready to start testing. 

Smart Inverter Target Platform system architecture

The figure underneath outlines the Triphase Smart Inverter Target system architecture. The main components of this system architecture are:

• PC-based signal processing hardware:
  There is no computing platform as powerful, as versatile, as user-friendly and as widely supported like the personal computer. Triphase uses the capabilities of commercially-off-the-shelf PC-based signal processing hardware to create user-friendly and powerful controller units. These controller units run a Linux-based operating system and can be loaded with algorithms that control the switching behaviour of the power converter valves, e.g. algorithms for vector control or dynamic torque control. The tremendous computational capacities of modern PC hardware leaves designers with virtually no constraints on the complexity of the algorithms they can implement. This PC-based solution provides much more flexibility than traditional DSP-based solutions.

• Smart Inverters:
  The Triphase Smart Inverters contain the actual power hardware. Smart inverters communicate with the PC-based controller unit through their Smart Interface. Via this channel, they send measurement data to the PC and receive the inverter output voltages as computed by the PC. The Smart Interface autonomously takes care of PWM generation. One controller unit can be shared among multiple inverters. This hardware-sharing feature allows to precisely synchronize the behaviour of different inverter units.

• User-friendly engineering tools:
  As a key component in its Simplifying Power Electronics philosophy, Triphase platforms can be programmed via a set of user-friendly engineering tools. The Triphase Smart Inverter Platform can, amongst others, be programmed by making use of Matlab/Simulink and Real-Time Workshop of the Mathworks corporation.

Contact us for more information on the Triphase Smart Inverter Target Platform.