Patent — available for licensing
Enhanced DC Bus Emulator
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
DC bus emulators are verification testing tools that emulate power load dynamics of entire power systems, subsystems, and individual loads. Due to limitations of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS )hardware, it is challenging and costly to evaluate the loads of complex systems using hardware alone. Innovators at NASA’s Glenn Research Center developed an easily implementable enhancement to existing DC bus emulators that overcome these limitations. The inspiration for this technology arose because NASA designs power systems for a variety of loads, from spacecraft and aircraft to future lunar outputs. The busses that power these loads may include simple, individual DC-to-DC power converters, or complex, integrated systems, such as robots, propulsors, refueling equipment, and habitation hardware. Each load and each system are key to an application’s function, making them critical to assess. However, using COTS DC loads it is not possible to fully, dynamically replicate power systems, subsystems, or individual loads on a small-signal basis. Further, this replication method is costly and time-consuming because hardware copies are needed to recreate each individual load that will be assessed in a DC microgrid. In contrast, using a mixture of representative filters, a Pulsed Width Modulator (PWM) dithering technique, and COTS loads, this technology provides a collaborative way to integrate individual, sub-system, and entire power systems loads.