Power Hardware in the Loop (PHIL) Simulation of Battery Packs

Abstract

Power-Hardware in the loop (PHIL) simulation is a powerful technique that uses a real-time simulator to compute a model of a given system in real time to send power signals from the model to a physical load connected to the simulator. To improve battery designs and battery management systems, PHIL simulations can be used to test their response under dynamic load conditions. The response from the load in connection to the battery model can be sent back to the model as feedback. It provides a novel approach to designing and testing new configurations of batteries from data of a single cell without building their real prototypes. An equivalent circuit model and a physics-based model of batteries were developed in SIMULINK and tested for PHIL implementation using the OPAL-RT. The single particle model was chosen for its simplicity and to investigate the internal states of the battery with a real load with PHIL simulations.