Description:
Reference #: 01492
The University of South Carolina is offering licensing opportunities for Software and Synthesis Development Libraries for Power Electronic System Real-Time Simulation
Background:
In the development of power electronic ships, is often required to perform Real-Time (RT) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations of these systems to prototype and validate the design of the system before physical construction. Modern ship systems are expected to make large use of high switching frequency power electronic converters. For reliable simulation of such high switching frequency power electronics systems, very small-time steps less than 100ns are required. To execute real-time simulation of power electronic systems at such time steps, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processors have recently become the norm, as seen in recent work which allows for highly parallelized and low latency computations of simulations.
Invention Description:
A set of tools for the creation of model solvers of electrical and power electronic system models for use in high-performance real-time simulation. The tools allow system models to be defined in plain-text and solver execution code can be generated from the models. The solvers are runnable on FPGA technologies to achieve fast, high-fidelity real-time simulation for testing and prototyping.
Potential Applications:
The proposed innovation provides tools to rapidly model electrical and power electronic systems and then conveniently generate real-time simulation solvers of the models that can efficiently execute on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to achieve less than or equal to 50 nanosecond simulation time steps.
Advantages and Benefits:
The electrical/power electronic system simulation solvers generated by the innovation have computational speeds that are one or two orders of magnitude faster than other contemporary solutions, allowing for much smaller simulation time steps in real-time execution than before. Modern power electronic system problems, with their ever-faster dynamics, are not addressed by existing commercial real-time simulation tools due to their slower computational performance, whereas the innovation can address these new problems.