Heterogeneous Real-Time Co-Emulation for Communication-Enabled Global Control of AC/DC Grid Integrated with Renewable Energy

The information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly merging with the conventional power systems. For the design and development of modern AC/DC grids with integrated renewable energy sources, the system-level control schemes with ICTs involved should be evaluated in a co-simulation framework. In this work, a heterogeneous hardware real-time co-emulator composed of FPGAs, many-core GPU, and multi-core CPU devices is proposed to study the communication-enabled global control schemes of hybrid AC/DC networks. The electromagnetic transient (EMT) power system emulation is conducted on the Xilinx FPGA boards to provide nearly continuous instantaneous waveforms for cyber layer sampling; the communication layer is simulated on the ARM CPU cores of the embedded NVIDIA Jetson platform for flexible computing and programming; and the control functions for modular multi-level converters are executed on GPU cores of the Jetson platform for parallel calculation. The data exchange between FPGAs and Jetson is achieved via the PCI express interface, which simulates the sampling operation of the AC phasor measurement unit (PMU) and DC merging unit (DC-MU). The power overflow and DC fault cases are investigated to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed co-emulation hardware architecture and global control schemes.