A new versatile hardware platform for digital real-time simulation: Verification and evaluation

A new hardware platform for digital real-time simulation and control applications is introduced which is highly expandable and customizable due to its modular design and flexible, open interfaces. The system is based on digital signal processors (DSPs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A detailed description of the processor and interface boards as core components of the system is given. A small-scale desktop system for hardware-in-the-loop real-time simulations is shown. Furthermore, modeling methodologies and commonly used integration techniques with regard to usual problems and practical implementation are presented. An actual implementation is presented as an example simulation which is used to verify the functionality and evaluate the performance of the real-time simulation platform. A real-time simulation of a buck converter with a time-step of 1 µs without FPGA co-processing is shown and the simulation results are compared to real hardware measurements. To address the common problem of inter time-step switching, solutions are discussed and two approaches are implemented and compared. In total, this paper presents a short overview of digital real-time simulation including modeling and integration, software implementation, hardware platform for code execution and hardware-in-the-loop testing.