A design and implementation of FPGA-based real-time simulator for distribution system with DG integration

Real-time simulation of distribution system is challenging due to its' complex structure consisting of DGs. In this literature, a real-time simulator for distribution system with DG integration based on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) is realized for hardware emulation. The overall framework and asynchronous multi-rate interface method between DG with high nonlinearity and distribution system is proposed. The models of main components in distribution system are designed in FPGA. The hardware parallelism and highly pipeline design is utilized to guarantee real-time simulation, which has strong generality and flexibility. The simulator uses a floating point arithmetic calculation to achieve high accuracy. To validate the new simulator, a photovoltaic-battery hybrid generation system and a typical distribution system integrated with PV generation system are emulated in the hardware. The time-step of DG system and distribution system reach 1.096μs/1.696μs and 2μs/2μs respectively. The captured waveforms show excellent accuracy in comparison to the offline simulation in PSCAD/EMTDC. The time-step is less than RTDS which indicate a higher precision. The resource consumption of FPGA also show advantage compared with RTDS.