Investigation of HIL interfaces in nonlinear load studies

We report on the power hardware in the loop (PHIL) interfaces with respect to a nonlinear load. The stability criteria can be affected by systems which contain highly nonlinear loads thus this paper looks into the behavior of such a system. For the power interface of the HIL, five different methods are used and the buck converter is considered as the nonlinear load which serves as the hardware under test (HUT). Two important characteristics of the PHIL are stability and accuracy which are tested on the system. In this paper four configurations are discussed for the buck converter as the HUT which results in different stability and accuracy of the output voltage. The output voltage errors of the five methods are compared in this paper. All of the analysis is done with Matlab/Simulink.