An Efficient Hierarchical Zonal Method for Large-Scale Circuit Simulation and Its Real-Time Application on More Electric Aircraft Microgrid

Large-scale circuit simulation poses a challenge to most simulation tools because of its high computational complexity. This paper presents an efficient method, which decouples the circuit topology and components' characteristics in computation so as to make it suitable for large-scale circuit simulation. The proposed method is based on a circuit lemma, which indicates the relationship of branch voltages and currents. The proving process of this lemma is provided in this paper. The working principle of the proposed method is elaborated and its numerical stability is also analyzed. This method achieves nearly linear computational complexity and is very suitable for hierarchical and zonal computation. The proposed method is verified by real-time application on the more electric aircraft microgrid. Hardware-in-the-loop testing of this study case on Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale+ field programmable gate array (FPGA) board is achieved and the results are compared with PSCAD/EMTDC. The resulting waveforms from these two simulation tools show very good agreement on both normal and fault operation test scenarios, which demonstrates that the proposed method has very good performance on computational accuracy and efficiency.