The incremental design process for power electronic building blocks

A key concept behind the power electronic building block (PEBB) is the use of standard building blocks to reduce the complexity associated with design of a power electronic system. But designing the PEBB modules that others will subsequently use requires a sophisticated process that supports incremental design procedures. We describe here how the PEBB design process, and application of PEBBs in systems, is facilitated by the virtual test bed software through a number of specific features. The process is illustrated with the help of an application example that best exploits some of these VTB capabilities. An important aspect of this is an original approach to load flow simulation