Switching-Period-Synchronization-Based Real-Time Simulation Method Suitable for Power Converters With High Switching Frequency

The switching frequency of power electronic converters can be as high as hundreds of kilohertz in some cases. The time-step of the real-time simulation is generally suggested to be about one percent of the switching period to accurately locate the switch event. That brings great computation burden in unit time. To break this limitation, this article proposes a real-time simulation method based on the idea of switching period synchronization (SPS). The simulation time is synchronized with the reality time at an interval of the switching period, instead of the time-step. The switching period is adopted as the synchronization interval and also as the main time-step, which is further divided into several variable sub-time-steps determined by switch events within the switching period. To implement the proposed real-time simulation on the field-programmable gate array-based platform, an electromagnetic transient model in discrete-state-space form is proposed to simulate the circuit with the variable subtime-steps. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation of an on-board charger shows that the proposed method can realize the real-time simulation with a switching frequency of 200 kHz. The accuracy, efficiency, and applicability of the proposed method have been further validated.