Faster-Than-Real-Time Dynamic Simulation of AC/DC Grids on Reconfigurable Hardware

Dynamic simulation of integrated AC and DC grids is paramount to address real-time operation challenges in energy control centers, such as available transfer capacities, relieving grid congestion, and taking effective control actions for improving the integrated grid system stability and reliability. This paper proposes a faster-than-real-time (FTRT) dynamic simulation of integrated AC/DC grids on the reconfigurable parallel hardware architecture of the field programmable gate array (FPGA). A fine-grained relaxation algorithm (FGRA) is proposed for a more efficient solution of the nonlinear differential algebraic equations of the integrated system model, including the detailed nonlinear models of the synchronous generators in the AC system which can be solved in parallel without matrix on the FPGA. The system solution is massively parallelized and pipelined in hardware to realize the lowest latencies and minimum utilization of hardware resource. Two case studies are used to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and demonstrated a closed-loop prediction scenario for improving grid stability. Computational acceleration of up to 134 times faster than real-time are reported for the two case studies, and the accuracy of the dynamic interaction is validated using the off-line transient stability simulation tool TSAT of the DSATools package.