A High-Fidelity, Low-Latency, FPGA-Based, Real-Time Development Platform for Advanced Aircraft Power Systems

This paper presents recently-developed capabilities of a real-time development platform and its application in simulating and testing an advanced aircraft power system in real time. This platform is based upon FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array - a reconfigurable, parallel computing device) that handles on-chip computation in real time with latency of 32 FPGA clock cycles (potentially within 200 nanoseconds). The component models solved by the innovative computational solvers are based on the first principles and can capture very fast electromagnetic transient processes happening in more-electric aircraft power systems. Discussed here in detail is a generalized, reconfigurable, real-time computational model for simulating the electro-magnetic and electro-mechanical dynamics occurring in a variety of electric machines. This real-time electric machine model is to solve systems of differential and algebraic equations in parallel on FPGA, and the main components include parallel and pipelined computational modules for input data sampling, mechanical dynamics calculation, abc-to-dq transformation, flux and current calculations, torque or horsepower calculations, dq-to-abc transformation, and data output, all of which are controlled by a synchronization signal with 32 clock cycles. The presented model can be used for power hardware-in-the-loop testing through the sensing, amplification and communication interfaces with external equipment, and can be easily reconfigured to emulate different types of electric machines such as synchronous machines, induction machines, and permanent-magnet machines, by setting up proper parameters for the real-time model. Simulation studies demonstrate that the real-time results for different types of generators, configured by using the same electric machine simulation model, agree well with the offline results obtained for those different generators using other standard tools. An advanced aircraft power system including an advanced engine starter/ generator (AESG) has been studied on the real-time development platform to validate the computational accuracy, by comparing the real-time results with offline simulation results using classical tools. The real-time power system model exhibits a great agreement in output variables with the offline simulation model.