FPGA Implementation of the Power Electronic Converter Model for Real-Time Simulation of Electromagnetic Transients

This paper presents an enhanced implementation methodology for the associated discrete circuit model of a power-electronic converter in a field-programmable gate array-based real-time power systems simulator. The simulator is intended for the testing and performance evaluation of digital control/protection platforms based on the hardware-in-the-loop concept. The salient features of the proposed implementation are: 1) It eliminates the need for corrective measures to reduce error due to the lack of synchronization between the simulation time-grid and output signals of the control/protection platform; 2) it provides scalability, that is, it maintains calculation time, within each simulation time step, nearly fixed irrespective of the system size; and 3) it enables the use of a small simulation timestep, for example, a couple of hundreds of nanoseconds for the overall system, in contrast to the microseconds range time-steps used in the existing simulators. Thus, it is also able to provide a wide frequency bandwidth for the simulation results. This paper also reports the implementation results and their verifications corresponding to real-time simulation of two converter units based on less than 60-ns calculation time within each simulation time step. The scalability property is also verified based on real-time simulation of six converter units.