A Real-time Simulator using a Cluster of FPGAs for Testing Distributed Generations

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a real-time simulator using a cluster of FPGAs that are interconnected by the communication protocol with ultra-low latency. While the time step below one microsecond achieved by the solver running on the FPGA guarantees to accurately capture the dynamics of switching power electronics, the low latency of the inter-FPGA communication reduces the restriction on the minimum travel time delay of the line, and thus the length of the line to decompose the simulated circuits into multiple subsystems that are parallelly processed on the FPGA cluster. Proof-of-concept is provided by simulating ten neighboring photovoltaic (PV) generation units in real-time on a cluster of three FPGAs. The results obtained from the proposed real-time simulator are compared and validated against the results given by the MATLAB/SimPowerSystem (SPS).