Case Study of Designing a Locally Distributed Real-Time Simulation Infrastructure

With an increasing number of power electronics connected renewable energy sources, electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations become increasingly important to accurately simulate the behavior of electric power grids. EMT simulations are computationally expensive, and often specialized hardware, such as Real-Time Digital Simulators (RTDS), are used to run simulations in real-time. As individual simulators are limited in their computational capabilities, they can be interconnected in order to fully leverage their potential and enable more complex simulations. However, since these simulators are expensive and often located near power hardware for hardware-in-the-loop simulation, they are regularly distributed across multiple locations of different research institutions or organizations. The main contribution of this paper is the assessment of different approaches to connect multiple RTDS systems to form a locally distributed simulation infrastructure. For this, we combine a realistic and comprehensive model of a campus grid with a microgrid model to investigate the benefits and limitations of the different connection approaches.