This paper presents rapid control prototyping of voltage source inverter (VSI). Control techniques for power converters are developing day by day. However, it is not practical to implement a controller in hardware to test its performance in real time. It is possible to implement the designed controller with real time simulator and then test it with the actual power converter circuit. Such a simulation is known as rapid control prototyping (RCP). In this paper, a three phase voltage source

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... er (VSI) is designed and implemented in hardware and the control technique for the VSI is implemented using a real time simulator and then interfaced with the hardware model of the VSI. The main aim of this paper is to implement rapid control prototyping for verifying the performance of the controller designed for the specific power electronic circuit Keywords: real time simulator (RTS), rapid controls prototyping (RCP), voltage source inverter (VSI), pulse width modulation, proportional integral (PI) controller. 1. INTRODUCTION Simulation is the representation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time through the use of other systems [1], [2]. Simulators are widely used for design and verification of electrical circuits. Simulators are categorized into offline simulators or software simulators and real time simulators. During offline simulation, the computational time of the equations and functions representing a system in a given step time maybe less or more than the step time of the simulation [3]. The main objective of offline simulation is to obtain result of the system and not the time at which it becomes available. However, real time simulation should produce the required results and the time at which the results are made available and it must be same as that of its physical counterpart [4]. Real time simulation is categorized into rapid control prototyping (RCP), hardware in loop (HIL), software in loop (SIL). In rapid control prototyping, the controller is implemented using RTS and then connected to the physical plant. Whereas in case of hardware-in-loop, the plant is implemented in RTS and then connected to the physical controller. In software-in-loop, both the plant and the controller are implemented using RTS [5].Rapid control prototyping allows prototyping of new and complex control system and also develop and improve existing control system used in various industrial processes. The main idea of this approach is to design and verify a control algorithm for a system in offline simulation and then implement it using RTS to verify its performance in real working conditions. Thus a real time controller is implemented. The real time implementation of the controller designed in offline simulators is done automatically by the RTS without any handwritten code. However, the offline simulator must be compatible with the RTS [6]. The application of RCP in various fields is highlighted in literature [7]-[10].