RT21 | MTDC HIL Test Bench for the Testing and Validation of New Control and Protection Functions

With the increasing level of penetration of renewable production and the need for long-distance energy transport, Multi-Terminal DC grids (MTDC) have become a crucial field of research for the future development of wide-scale DC grids. These MTDC grids pose several technical challenges: protecting the DC grid against electrical faults; transforming DC voltage; and controlling the flow of energy in a meshed system. The possible technical solutions and new technologies addressing these issues need to be assessed through real-time and HIL simulations to demonstrate the systems performance. With that perspective, an MTDC HIL test bench is being developed at the Supergrid Institute to test and validate any proposed control and protection solution. On this HIL setup, several Raspberry PIs are used to simulate in real time the different IEDs of the system: protection relays, station supervisors, DC Grid Control. These IEDs communicate with each other and with the electrical model using the IEC61850 communication protocol. The electrical benchmark is a 4 Terminal DC Grid, modelled with HYPERSIM and running in real time with an OP5700 simulator. The HYPERSIM model uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI), coded in Python and using the Python API provided by HYPERSIM. This interface allows a user to interact with the electrical system: launch a start-up sequence to connect the DC Grid, simulate a fault to test the implemented protection strategy.