eMEGAsim: An Open High-Performance Distributed Real-Time Power Grid Simulator. Architecture and Specification

This paper describes the architecture and specifications of advanced real-time simulators capable of accurately simulating electrical power grids and power electronic systems of any size. The OPAL-RT eMEGAsim simulator is based on modern high-performance distributed supercomputer technology comprised of off-the-shelf INTEL or AMD multi-core processors. Several eight-processor shared-memory supercomputer modules are interconnected with fast PCI Express communication links and IO systems controlled by Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Xilinx processors capable of executing sub-system models with time step below 250 nanoseconds. A brief history of the evolution of real-time simulators will be given followed by the main specification requirements for each type of application, a description of the simulator architecture and a typical application case. Cost

[1]  G. Dumur,et al.  Real-Time and Off-Line Simulation of a Detailed Wind Farm Model Connected to a Multi-Bus Network , 2007, 2007 IEEE Canada Electrical Power Conference.

[2]  J. Bélanger,et al.  Real-time Simulation of a 48-Pulse GTO STATCOM Compensated Power System on a Dual-Xeon PC using RT-LAB , 2005 .

[3]  C. Dufour,et al.  Real-Time Simulation of Permanent Magnet Motor Drive on FPGA Chip for High-Bandwidth Controller Tests and Validation , 2006, IECON 2006 - 32nd Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics.

[4]  C. Dufour,et al.  Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation of Finite-Element Based Motor Drives with RT-LAB and JMAG , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics.

[5]  C. Dufour,et al.  Discrete time compensation of switching events for accurate real-time simulation of power systems , 2001, IECON'01. 27th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (Cat. No.37243).

[6]  Hoang Le-Huy,et al.  A power system simulation tool based on Simulink , 1999, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron..

[7]  C. Dufour,et al.  Real-time HIL simulation of a complete PMSM drive at 10 /spl mu/s time step , 2005, 2005 European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications.

[8]  S. Abourida,et al.  Real-time PC-based simulator of electric systems and drives , 2002, APEC. Seventeenth Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (Cat. No.02CH37335).

[9]  V. Dinavahi,et al.  A versatile cluster-based real-time digital simulator for power engineering research , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

[10]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[11]  C. Dufour,et al.  FPGA-Based Real-Time Simulation of Finite-Element Analysis Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine Drives , 2007, 2007 IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.