An Inverter Model Simulating Accurate Harmonics With Low Computational Burden for Electromagnetic Transient Simulations

The electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation of a power system involving power-electronics converters requires a fairly small time-step size to consider switching of the converters, thus leading to a heavy computational burden. To accelerate such simulations, this article generalizes the time average method (TAM), originally developed for real-time simulations, so that it becomes suitable to offline EMT simulations. For obtaining accurate current waveforms with a large time step, the TAM and the proposed method represent each leg of an inverter by voltage sources, and its output voltage is modified by interpolation at an instance of switching. The original TAM was intended for the primitive backward Euler method. This article contributes to generalize it for the trapezoidal integration method, which is widely used in offline simulation programs. In addition, the proposed method uses a simple formula to identify the switching instance for the implementation on off-the-shelf PCs, rather than a hardware counter in an field programmable gate array as used in the TAM. This article shows that the proposed method enables to extend the time step by a factor of five without deteriorating the accuracy. A case study demonstrates reduction of computational time by a factor of three for the offline simulation of a single-phase grid-connected inverter with reasonable reproduction of harmonics.

Automated summary

This article introduces a method to accelerate the electromagnetic transient simulation of power-electronics converters by generalizing the time average method for offline simulations, using interpolation and a simplified switching instance identification formula. This approach improves simulation efficiency and allows for a larger time step without sacrificing accuracy.