A general purpose FPGA-based real-time simulator for power systems applications

This paper presents an FPGA-based (field programmable gate array) real-time digital simulator for power systems and power electronics applications. The proposed approach integrates the Modified Nodal Analysis (MNA) method, the Fixed Admittance Matrix Nodal Method (FAMNM) and multi-conductor transmission line modeling capabilities. In particular, the MNA is used to formulate the electrical circuit equations and the FAMNM for keeping the MNA nodal-matrix constant during switching transitions. The inherent parallel nature of FPGA’s computation is exploited by a suitably defined implementation of the simulation approach. The proposed simulator is validated by comparing its results to off-line simulations obtained using the EMTP-RV software. The proposed approach exhibits high computational speed together with excellent accuracy.