Power Electronics Development Center

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Control Engineering: Taking the complexity out of designing Smart-Grid devices

Taking the complexity out of designing Smart-Grid devices

National Instruments says a new development platform should bring renewable energy sources to the grid much faster.

02/15/2013

Last August, National Instruments (NI) unveiled a product that it expects to quicken the pace at which renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power make their way onto the Smart Grid. The NI Single-Board RIO General Purpose Inverter Controller (GPIC) includes a hardware chassis that harnesses field programmable gate-array (FPGA) technology and the well-known NI LabVIEW System Design Software suite. Control Engineering Contributing Editor Sidney Hill recently spoke with Brian MacCleery, National Instruments’ principal product manager for clean energy technology, about how this new development platform should ease the task of building Smart Grid-ready products.     

Hill: Let’s start with what I believe will be the biggest question for most Control Engineering readers. Exactly how can the NI Single-Board RIO GPIC make it easier to build products for the Smart Grid?

MacCleery: Our primary goal in developing the GPIC was to offer an embedded systems platform that is optimized for building grid-tied power control systems. 

This has been a collaborative effort with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the California Energy Commission. In addition, more than 20 companies around the world—all of whom are in NI’s customer base—had  input into the design of the GPIC, because we really wanted to make sure it matched their requirements. 

When we started this effort, we did question whether it was possible to develop an off-the-shelf system that could, in fact, be used by any company that does grid-tied power conversion. The release of the GPIC proves that we answered that question. 

Hill: How were you able to ultimately come up with a platform that is successfully being mass marketed? 

MacCleery: That’s an interesting question. As we started talking with companies in different industries about this problem, we quickly noticed that their requirements actually converged. We found that there was, indeed, a common set of requirements that spanned industries and applications. 

Because of the broad interest in solving this problem, virtually every company we contacted agreed to have its engineering team spend at least a half day with us, going over every single specification for the GPIC to make sure it would meet their specific requirements. 

We took that as a good sign. If companies were willing to invest that amount of time and resources to help us design it, there must be a real need for the type of solution we were developing. 

Hill: What were some of the common requirements? 

MacCleery: We’ve created a fact sheet that lists the GPIC’s specifications. They were carefully developed in collaboration with NREL, the California Energy Commission and approximately 20 companies that are heavily involved in designing power inverters. So, we know the platform will be used to develop inverters for a broad spectrum of applications...

...Continued... Read the full article in Control Engineering magazine

http://www.controleng.com/uploads/RTEmagicC_ctl-13-02-iem-national-instruments-circuit-board-for-basic-single-board-rio.jpg.jpghttp://www.controleng.com/uploads/RTEmagicC_ctl-13-02-iem-national-instruments-IO-map.jpg.jpghttp://www.controleng.com/uploads/RTEmagicC_ctl-13-02-iem-national-instruments-complete-toolchain-for-power-electronics_01.jpg.jpg

0 Kudos
Message 1 of 1
(4,051 Views)