Batteries are the gateway to the new
grid, microgrid, ship, car, airplane…
Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are becoming central to reliable and high-quality power delivery. Maximizing the value of BESS means pushing BESS control to its limits WITHOUT sacrificing battery life. Controller Hardware in the Loop (HIL) real-time simulation lets you perform high-fidelity tests on every level of your BESS Controllers at every level to ensure you meet your client’s needs.
- Lower project risk;
- Reduce time to value and reduce control development costs;
- A wider test coverage, including full system-level operation, extreme voltage conditions, faults, and communication layer tests;
- Time and money savings compared to Power HIL (PHIL) testing.

Control Development

Test your BMS at the cell and stack level
It doesn’t matter if your battery system will energize a car, ship or will support the grid: your storage solution needs a battery management system (BMS) that works. With Typhoon HIL simulators, you can model battery performance at the cell level for anything from small battery setups with only a dozen cells to large battery systems with thousands of interconnected cells and modules, considering:
- State of Charge (SOC)
- State of Health (SOH)
- Cell temperature
- Common fault cases (Cell short circuits, sensor faults, cell thermal runaway, etc.)

“
By the time you get to a customer site, you want to have good confidence in the controls that you’re running. We were able to do that by testing all the algorithms in the hardware-in-the-loop environment.
Ryan Smith
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
EPC Power

Master battery control for any use case with detailed inverter models
High-fidelity BESS models means mastering power electronics converter control. Our pre-built inverter models let you calculate both switching and conduction (MOSFET) power losses in real-time with a sampling frequency as high as 3.5 nanoseconds with just the manufacturer’s datasheet.
Build a test solution that controls real inverters and grid protection equipment from EPC Power, Hitachi ABB, and others straight out of the box, thanks to our HIL Compatible offering.
Use our control models with built-in optimization logic or import your own control scheme by uploading DLL files directly into the model. Generic Battery components with built-in FRT behavior let you scale up your model.
Validation

Spend less time on PHIL tests, and approach them with more confidence
PHIL tests are noisy, expensive, and potentially risky. With Typhoon HIL high-fidelity models, you can pre-validate performance of your planned PHIL tests with your real controller code to address critical issues before you risk damaging real equipment. This means safer PHIL tests with less failures, resulting in huge cost and time savings in the lab testing phase. You can even test controller performance in conditions that are very difficult to replicate in the lab, such as phase-to-ground brownouts and island mode conditions.

“
I don’t have people blowing up hardware and I don’t have to listen to it. I like that I can just walk back and know that everyone’s doing real work without destroying their eardrums.
Tony Olivo
Director of Engineering
FlexGen

Save development costs with Test Automation and API testing
Building your model is one thing, but testing and controlling it is where the real fun is. When it comes to HIL testing, covering a wide variety of test cases quickly is the best way to gain confidence that your BESS and control system will behave as expected in the real world.
Typhoon HIL’s powerful built-in Test Automation tools lets you quickly build tests with an intuitive GUI. Or just deploy your own Python code directly in the interface. After running the tests, interactive Allure reports let you quickly assess the details of every test case, so you can build your next rapid control prototype.
Our Typhoon API makes this even easier, letting you control models in real-time and run test cases directly from the command line. After all, it is just Python- no proprietary formatting to learn or lock you in.

“
We explored a lot of different types of generators, and different types of loads, and pretty much everything. We’ve really run the gauntlet in the Typhoon library.
Preston Miller
Firmware Engineer
FlexGen
System Integration

Test your control commands on real controller hardware in the prototyping stage
Whether you are building your own battery component, or integrating a full battery storage system, understanding how your controllers operate on product grade firmware and software systems is invaluable to ensuring your Virtual System Integration (VSI) behaves as expected in the real-world.
Our collection of HIL Compatible controllers means that you can have product-grade controllers in a format that enables Virtual System Integration. But don’t just ask us: check out how HIL Compatible controllers like EPC Power and Lishen BMS help our customers test and deploy powerful products and full system integrations.

“
The Typhoon HIL simulator helps us to push the limits in our testing. It is a digital twin of our power system and easy to access in our lab.
Michele Fusero
Senior R&D Engineer
Hitachi ABB Power Grids

Test the communication layer as it will be in the real (micro)grid
Testing fast-response capabilities of a BESS is not complete without accounting for the communication layer. Control and protection devices in the Typhoon HIL toolchain can be interfaced via fast analog and digital IO signals and using standard communication protocols to account for communication delays:
- DNP3 and IEC 60870-5-104 for SCADA applications
- CAN Bus, CAN Open, and SAE J1939
- MODBUS over TCP/IP and SunSpec
- OPC UA
- OpenFMB standard
- IEC 61850 Sampled Values and GOOSE Messaging
- Synchrophasor data
- Generic TCP/UDP communication

Rapid Control Prototyping that’s designed to work WITH you
The Typhoon HIL toolchain is built from the ground up to let you build and test high-fidelity models quickly, under a wide variety of conditions, without needing third-party support. But we understand, sometimes you need to integrate models and systems from multiple developers, or you’d just rather see how you can upgrade your existing toolchain in a more agile way.
In that case, take advantage of our powerful interoperability tools. Hardware interfaces let you connect directly to external controllers or modeling software (from TI, dSPACE, JMAG-RT, and more). C-Code and DLL imports and exports let you use Matlab models and Simulink control code directly in your Typhoon Model, or vice versa. With the 2021.2 release, you can even customize C-code generation to the external platform of your choice. This lets you approach Rapid Control Prototyping in the way that works best for your development process.

“
Early porting of the control algorithm to the real target hardware can solve a large number of control hardware configuration issues prior to system integration, saving significant development time and costs.
Dr. Roland Greul
BU Electrification and Racing Test System
AVL List
Supporting Research

Validating tomorrow’s BESS, today
Deploying new designs for Battery Energy Storage Systems and developing new business models for maximizing their value is critical to bringing BESS to scale. Typhoon HIL stays on the cutting edge by participating in major research projects designed to bring these solutions closer to the market.
In the CREATORS project, Typhoon HIL develops digital-twin solutions for validating business models and control use cases of new BESS in ports, heavy industry facilities, business parks, and mixed-use microgrids. In the HYBRIS project, Typhoon HIL empowers companies to develop and test controls for a new hybrid-storage battery system optimized for energy and power performance more easily, thoroughly, and accurately than would be possible otherwise.
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CREATORS and HYBRIS have received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement Nos. 957815 and 963652, respectively. |