The RWTH-PGS Living Lab

Location & Host Organization
This living lab is located at the facilities of the Institute for Power Generation and Storage Systems at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.

Primary Scope
The facilities of RWTH-PGS are open to the project consortium for testing and verifying DC equipment and the compatibility of control strategies, especially in multivendor systems.

The RWTH-PGS living lab focuses on the testing of the developed DC solutions and their integration with other components. The preparation of the living lab and the conducted tests are important steps for the setup and operation of the EATON/RWTH industry demonstrator.

Key Assets
The living lab includes a 700 V low-voltage DC (LVDC) part and a 5 kV medium-voltage DC (MVDC) part. A new LVDC link fed by an AC connection is established and integrated into the MVDC system by a modular LVDC-MVDC converter. Different power electronic converters, assets, and equipment are available to create flexible test setups. A true multi-vendor environment is created this way. The converters can be used to emulate different load or generation assets. A short-circuit emulator allows the testing of DC protection devices and strategies, as well as DC fault-ride-through schemes.

Value to Shift2DC
The living lab is open to project partners for testing DC-DC converters, DC circuit breakers, DC cables, DC monitoring, or system control. The DC solutions to be used in the demonstrators can be tested before installation, under varying operating conditions. Especially the capability to test assets under fault conditions that would not occur under normal operating conditions in the demonstrators is valuable to the consortium.