<p>Sufficient testing of engineering system controllers is an important step in research and engineering development. Although experimentation has widely utilized within scientific community in various disciplines, conducting such experimental investigation is quite challenging for complex system where decreasing the cost and time are highly needed in addition to other factors such as risk and safety concerns, flexibility, and laboratory space or field testing requirement. This has led to the development of an effective investigation methodologies that avoid hurting a real-system or building small-scale prototype for testing. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing methodology has gained recently wide acceptance from the scientific community worldwide as it allows virtual or actual components of a complex system to be implemented and tested together with the controller in real-time environment. The effectiveness of HIL is justified by a number of factors such as the ability to perform severe tests on complex system which are extremely difficult to be implemented in real-word environment particularly with unproven technologies. The current paper provides an overview of the application of HIL testing methodology in different disciplines including electric power systems, renewable energy, automotive, aerospace, mechanical engineering and manufacturing. &nbsp;A novel HIL platform for drill string system control is presented where the operation principle and hardware components are presented. The platform can be employed to investigate different types of active feedback controller for drill string system to eliminate the torsional vibration while enhancing its efficiency. A discontinuous lumped-parameter torsional model of a vertical drill string based on four components (rotary table, drill pipes, drill collars and drill bit) is considered using a real parameters. A power plant for the drill string system including an induction motor, a gearbox and a variable frequency drive is designed and implemented in the real-time simulator OPAL-RT 5600, whereas the controllers are implemented the real-time controller dSPACE 1103. A variety of tests have been performed to provide a comprehensive study on the effectiveness of the HIL testing on the drill string controller verification that take advantage of state-of-the-art real-time simulators. As the HIL enables perform testing in a faulty condition of the system that cannot be applied on a real physical system, different fault scenarios are introduced on the drill string system to investigate and analyze its behavior and to better design a robust controller that can tackle wide type of faults. The proposed HIL infrastructure can be extended to accommodate different studied on drill string system as well as other electromechanical systems.</p>

Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for Large-Scale Applications

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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