Low-Cost Hardware in the Loop Implementation of a Boost Converter

The use of Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) has been increasing recently owing to its flexibility in allowing an efficient and economical approach to promote real-time emulation. In the field of power electronics, HIL can be a useful solution since it allows testing control techniques in real controller devices without running the risk of damaging expensive components. However, real-time emulation requires powerful hardware to be performed, which has the drawback of increasing the HIL implementation's cost. Therefore, this paper proposes a low-cost HIL implementation for real-time emulation and control of a boost converter that uses the STM32 high-performance microcontroller unit (MCU). Stand-alone simulation on PSIM software and validation using an experimental boost converter are executed.