During the first 18 months of implementation, Work Package 2 (WP2) successfully advanced its core objective of enabling the seamless integration of low voltage direct current (LVDC) technologies by systematically modelling, simulating, and defining the boundary conditions for DC-enabled energy infrastructures. An achievement was the comprehensive definition of five High-Level Use Cases (HLUCs)—encompassing photovoltaic prosumers, battery energy storage, DC-native loads, industrial hybrid microgrids, and V2X electromobility—which were mapped into dozens of specific operational scenarios across varying nominal voltage and current levels. To rigorously analyze these scenarios, WP2 engineered an advanced real-time digital co-simulation methodology and testbed that successfully integrates MATLAB Simulink for high-fidelity discrete-time control logic (such as MPPT and PID controllers) with the Typhoon HIL platform for physical power system emulation, utilizing the standardized Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) to accurately capture sub-microsecond fault transients. By deliberately injecting short-circuit faults into this digital environment, we extracted high-resolution short-circuit current profiles and evaluated system dynamics, generating representative datasets that directly established the analytical models and physical design specifications for the current limiting devices developed in Work Package 3. Furthermore, WP2 successfully finalized the required deliverables for the reporting period (D2.1 and D2.2) and actively fostered open science by publishing the parametric short-circuit dataset on open repositories, ensuring the project's numerical findings actively support the broader power engineering and real-time digital simulation communities.
Different magnetoresistance-based components and magnetic field generators are modelled, designed, fabricated and characterized.
WP3 is concerned with establishing a model to describe the magnetoresistive components and their behavior, optimizing the element to reach as high as possible MR ratio at room temperature for effective current limiting operation. Stacked component strategies will be investigated for load current within 10-100A range.
Two laboratory testing set-ups were built for testing the performance of the MFG prototypes, built by EAT, and of the EMR component, built by SAL.
A stationary current test set-up was built with DC power supplies, a Tesla meter and multimeter devices. This set-up was used to test the MFG prototypes at currents up to 300A.
As one of the most important challenges for the series Current Limiter design is the thermal management of the EMR element during the current limiting regime, EAT designed a second testing set-up, for component and system testing, which can apply the required current level for a limited period (current pulse generator).
Moroever, a LCA and S-LCA have been performed:
From the LCA study:
• creation of a proper data collection file to be employed within the NOVETROL project for both LCA and S-LCA;
• development of an LCA model to be used to produce LCA results throughout the NOVETROL project;
• from the study, it comes out that even if used in small quantities, some materials carry an important environmental burden (such as gold). It should be investigated whether the gold used in the device can be recycled gold and whether the supplier of gold pellets for the electronic industry does use recycled gold.
• LCA results are as good as the quality of the data provided. Therefore, results should be taken as indications with a defined uncertainty.
From the S-LCA study:
• creation of a proper data collection file to be employed within the NOVETROL project for both LCA and S-LCA;
• development of an S-LCA model to be used to produce S-LCA results throughout the NOVETROL project;
• S-LCA results are significantly dependent on the geography of the processes and materials; therefore, when the geographical location changes, there may be an important change in the results;
• Based on commercially available databases (PSILCA and SHDB) and the nature of the S-LCA methodology and type of data required, it is very hard to perform prospective S-LCA;
• S-LCA results concerning the CL device highlight that workers are the stakeholder group mostly affected, especially due to the mining activity required to produce some of the components/materials required.
