Control Systems Testing with a Flexible Co-simulation Interface to PSCAD/EMTDC

This paper discusses a general-purpose co-simulation interface to a non-real-time electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation software called PSCAD. The interface uses embedded Python interpreter which supplements the EMT capabilities with powerful mathematical functions and scripting facilities. The co-simulation is demonstrated with an example of controls implemented in Python running on a personal computer (PC) as well as the same controls running on a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller via an interrupt-based processor-in-loop (PIL) version of the interface. The PIL platform allows for rapid development, validation, testing, and prototyping of the control algorithm on a hardware platform. The paper presents the advantages of performing PIL co-simulation using a powerful scripting language such as Python embedded into an EMT simulation. It includes comprehensive details of the interface along with controller source code to help readers implement it. The power systems example used to demonstrate the interface is a boost converter implemented in PSCAD.