Cascaded H-Bridge based Parallel Hybrid Converter – A new Voltage Source for Power-Hardware-in-the-Loop Emulation Systems

This paper presents a new 50 kVA Parallel Hybrid Converter (PHC) for Power-Hardware-in-the-Loop (PHIL) emulation systems. The converter combines the high output voltage quality of a low power 17-level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) converter in star configuration with the high efficiency and high power density of a 2-level converter. The requirements a converter topology must fulfill in order to be used for PHIL emulation systems are derived and it is shown, that the PHC topology characteristics ideally meet these requirements.