Energies 2012, 5(6), 1713-1733; doi:10.3390/en5061713
Article

A High Performance Real-Time Simulator for Controllers Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing

Mahmoud Matar 1,* email, Houshang Karimi 2 email, Amir Etemadi 1 email and Reza Iravani 1 email
1 University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G4, Canada 2 Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, P.O. Box 11365-9363, Iran
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 19 March 2012; in revised form: 15 May 2012 / Accepted: 21 May 2012 / Published: 4 June 2012
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electrical Power and Energy Systems)
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Abstract: This paper presents a high performance real-time simulator for power electronic systems applications and primarily intended for controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) testing. The novelty of the proposed simulator resides in the massively parallel hardware architecture that efficiently exploits fine-grained parallelism without imposing severe communication overhead time that can limit the performance. The simulator enables the use of a nanosecond range simulation timestep to simulate power electronic systems. Through the use of this nanosecond range simulation timestep, the simulator minimizes the error arising from the intersimulation timestep switching phenomenon associated with CHIL. The proposed hardware architecture is realized based on the FPGA technology. The simulator is tested and its CHIL capability verified based on the closed-loop testing of a robust multivariable servomechanism controller for autonomous operation of a distributed generation unit.
Keywords: real-time simulation; electromagnetic transients; distributed generation; power electronics interface; modeling; FPGA

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Cite This Article

MDPI and ACS Style

Matar, M.; Karimi, H.; Etemadi, A.; Iravani, R. A High Performance Real-Time Simulator for Controllers Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing. Energies 2012, 5, 1713-1733.

AMA Style

Matar M, Karimi H, Etemadi A, Iravani R. A High Performance Real-Time Simulator for Controllers Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing. Energies. 2012; 5(6):1713-1733.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Matar, Mahmoud; Karimi, Houshang; Etemadi, Amir; Iravani, Reza. 2012. "A High Performance Real-Time Simulator for Controllers Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing." Energies 5, no. 6: 1713-1733.

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