A Device-Level Transient Modeling Approach for the FPGA-Based Real-Time Simulation of Power Converters

The device-level real-time simulation of power converters is constrained by the contradiction between the required short simulation time step to describe the transient behaviors and the large computational amount caused by the nonlinearities of switches’ models. In this paper, a novel low-latency device-level power converter modeling approach is proposed for field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based real-time simulation. A piecewise linear insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)/diode transient model is proposed based on the inductive switching behaviors. The switching transient is modeled into four phases, which are identified by the boundaries between three operating regions of IGBT and between two operating modes of a diode. Moreover, each phase is approximated by a linear continuous behavior in order to reduce the real-time computational amounts. Accompanied by the effective boundary identification, the device-level IGBT/diode model can be efficiently integrated into the real-time simulation with low computational latency. A dc–dc–ac topology model is implemented on the FPGA-based real-time platform, as a case study to verify the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed approach. With the help of circuit partitioning techniques, the device-level converter model can be simulated with a 50-ns time step on FPGA. Moreover, the accuracy of FPGA-based simulation results is validated by the error evaluation with respect to the results from offline simulation tools.