Multi-FPGA Solution for Large Power Systems and Microgrids Real Time Simulation

This paper presents a Multi FPGA based solution for large power systems and Microgrids real-time simulation. The proposed platform allows control and protection devices to be designed and tested in virtual power system, before they can be implemented in a physical system. This solution promotes flexibility of operation with no risk of components failure under any contingency analysis. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the OPAL-RT platform, a large distribution network (DN) of 210 bus bars and a Microgrid (MG) are considered. The MG includes a solar panel and a battery energy storage system (BESS). The complete power system including the DN and MG is simulated using only two Kintex-7 FPGA boards. The controllers of the MG distributed energy resources (DER) are compiled and real time simulated using a 3.5 GHz Intel processor. The performance of this overall Processor-In-The-Loop application (PIL) is validated based on two criteria: 1) Evaluation of the results accuracy compared to the reference offline simulation under steady state and transient conditions. 2) Evaluation of the losses introduced by the power interface used to split the DN into two FPGA boards.