Validation Platform for Grid Forming Control Strategies of Power Electronic Inverters: From Component to System Level Validation

In the last years green energies have become more and more relevant in the
scenario of energy production, also thanks to European politics. The transition
towards a 100% renewable system have introduced new challenges correlated to
the grid stability and reliability. In order to address all these issues, novel grid
forming techniques has been proposed. Several studies present promising results,
mainly based on offline simulations. However, despite the active research effort
in the field, at the moment, no real-time simulations, as well as, laboratory prototypes which implements grid forming control strategies have been performed
or tested. Due to the lack of working prototypes and practical applications,
the use of these novel strategies are still uncertain. More than analysing the
behaviour of the grid forming techniques, this thesis attempts to give a contribution by providing a methodology for performing controller-hardware-in-theloop simulations. In particular, two different platforms are configured in order
to perform component and system level validations. Several technical solutions
are presented to guarantee electrical compatibility between different parts of the
setups. Furthermore, apposite libraries and automatic routines are developed to
facilitate the user during the simulation process. In order to expand the flexibility of the platform used to perform system level validation, a fully configurable
interface board is developed and tested. The proposed platforms are fully customizable to allow investigations of other test cases different from the examples
proposed in this work.