Verification of microgrid on all levels.
Investment sizing
Make your offer more competitive.
Make everyday communication with stakeholders and suppliers more effective and streamlined.
Become empowered to size and specify future microgrid projects exactly to your client’s needs and provide a realistic ROI and OPEX assessment.
Be equipped with all the details for making smart investments that are in the optimal balance of price and quality.
Interactive project portfolio
Use your digital resources to grow your business.
Use digital replicas of your microgrid projects to support your sales and business activities.
Create a completely interactive project catalog to show the operational and financial benefits to your prospects and clients. Take your projects on the road and use them as fully interactive microgrid demos at fairs and trade shows.
“Using HIL we are able to add existing commercial controls, modify them and couple them up with a supervisory control system making them behave the way we need them in order to work in a functional microgrid. And we can feel confident that, when constructed, system will behave the way the simulation showed.”
Full interoperability
Eradicate interoperability issues at the very beginning.
Connect your prototypes to existing energy storage systems, PV plants, diesel gensets, etc. The Typhoon HIL development environment offers industry-standard interfaces and supports all major communication protocols (e.g. ModBus, IEC 61850, IEC 61400). Optimize your microgrid control software algorithms for integration with the existing substation communication protocols and existing DERs to see how will the newly added infrastructure communicate with external resources. Finally, minimize the risks of buying suboptimal (and oversized) components by assessing their behavior and performance in a virtual environment.
Proof of concept
Verify your designs from the earliest stages.
Create a fully working microgrid control prototype and assess its behavior even at the earliest steps of its lifecycle. Interface your designs with a high-fidelity digital model of the power system executed on ultra-low-latency real-time emulators and harness the benefits of test-driven development.
Invest your efforts into early testing under diverse rare or faulty conditions, rather than running into them unprepared later on.
Test-driven development
From specification to commissioning.
Start your design process by defining the test criteria and then test extensively from the earliest design stages. Gain direct insight into the behavior of your controls under all imaginable operating conditions. Optimize your development processes and enable full test automation on component, sub-system, and system level.
In sum, reduce development costs and shorten development cycles while improving your control design.
Full interoperability
Eradicate interoperability issues at the very beginning.
Connect your prototypes to existing energy storage systems, PV plants, diesel gensets, etc. The Typhoon HIL development environment offers industry-standard interfaces and supports all major communication protocols (e.g. ModBus, IEC 61850, IEC 61400). Optimize your microgrid control software algorithms for integration with the existing substation communication protocols and existing DERs to see how will the newly added infrastructure communicate with external resources.
Minimize the risks of buying suboptimal (and oversized) components by assessing their behavior and performance in a virtual environment.
Terrestrial microgrid
HIL Model Example
Model highlights |
- 2 x three-phase (switching) inverters
- 1 x three-phase two winding transformer
- 1 x induction machine with wound rotor
- 1 x generator average model
- Highly detailed PV, battery and diesel genset control algorithm with governor and exciter in signal processing
In-house pre-commissioning
Get ready to pass commissioning in a single go.
Validating your designs as they mature means entering commissioning with confidence. As the behavior of every component in your system is exhaustively tested and validated on its own and as a part of the system at every integration step, possibilities to experience unexpected behaviors and extend planned commissioning time are wiped out.
Fully validate your system against multiple sets of most common standardized tests (anti-islanding, LVRT, etc.), even those that are next-to-impossible to recreate in conventional power labs.
Protection validation
Use virtual copies of protection relays to validate emergency scenarios.
Validate relay parameters and test the entire protection layer against short circuits, phase losses, overvoltages, low and overvoltage ride throughs as well as component failures. Connect the physical protection relays to your real-time replica of the microgrid on the signal, power, and communication level. Using Typhoon API and Python scripting, execute complex scenarios and fully automate your testing processes. The same environment enables you to conduct a sensitivity analysis of the whole system in real-time.
Power automation testing
Digital and physical combined.
Harness the advantages of both worlds and overcome the limitations of conventional labs. Digitalize the power layer of the entire distribution system with ultra-high fidelity and low latency, to drive these digital resources with real control code in real time. Use physical product-grade controllers to operate DERs and breakers at critical places with their official software and firmware releases.
Digitalization of Microgrids and Electrical Distribution Networks
Learn more about the digitalization of microgrids and the capabilities of Hardware-in-the-loop platform for microgrid testing on Typhoon HIL Blog
Lifetime operations support
By creating the microgrid’s digital twin, you can ensure full lifecycle support and maintenance.
Use the benefits of digital models beyond commissioning. Once developed, the digital model of your microgrid installation becomes a “living documentation” for all future retrofits, modifications, and software updates. The digital replica’s true value starts its journey as a digital twin to the physical setup. Feed the digital twin with data from the physical world to open up a new realm of possibilities.
Digital replicas of commissioned microgrids can also serve as a dynamic portfolio of your projects. Used properly, they can boost both your sales and asset management processes.
Software update maintenance
Test all software and firmware updates in an isolated, virtual environment.
Use the digital twin of your control to easily apply your software or firmware updates. This way, you can test these updates in a safe virtual environment throughout all conditions. You can even apply rare or extreme conditions, to make sure that the update provides improved and risk-free performance.
This approach to maintenance will make your update process go fast and smooth, without risks to damage any equipment in field.