Large-Scale Real-Time Electromagnetic Transient Simulation of Power Systems Using Hardware Emulation on FPGAs

• Author / Creator

  Chen, Yuan

• This thesis describes how FPGAs can be used for realizing real-time electromagnetic transient simulation of large-scale power systems using digital hardware emulation. Detailed parallel hardware modules for various power system components are described, including linear lumped RLCG elements, supply sources, circuit breakers. Hardware modules for transmission lines include traveling wave (Bergeron) model, frequency-dependent line model (FDLM), and universal line model (ULM). Various rotating electric machines are modeled using universal machine (UM) model. The network solution exploits sparse matrix techniques for improved efficiency. A novel parallelled EMT solution algorithm is described that accommodates the parallel FPGA architecture. For inclusion of nonlinear elements in power system, a parallel iterative nonlinear network solver is described that uses Newton-Raphson method both continuous and piecewise. Multiple FPGAs are utilized for real-time EMT emulation of large-scale power systems. A novel functional decomposition method is introduced to allocate the model components to the available hardware emulation modules in the FPGAs. All hardware arithmetic units designed are deeply pipelined to achieve highest computation throughput. 32-bit floating-point number representation is used for high accuracy throughout the EMT simulation. The whole design is based on VHDL for portability and extensibility.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Power systems
  • Digital hardware simulation
  • FPGAs
  • Electromagnetic transients

• Graduation date

  Spring 2012

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3H31X

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.