Exact Nonlinear Micromodeling for Fine-Grained Parallel EMT Simulation of MTDC Grid Interaction With Wind Farm

Abstract

Detailed high-order models of the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) and the diode are rarely included in power converters for large-scale system-level electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation on the CPU, due to the nonlinear characteristics albeit they are more accurate. The massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) enables a lower computational burden by avoiding the computation of complex devices repetitively in a sequential manner and thus is utilized in this paper to simulate the wind farm-integrated multiterminal dc (MTdc) grid based on the modular multilevel converter (MMC). Fine-grained circuit partitioning is proposed so that the nonlinear switching elements are physically separated with the smallest circuit unit. By implementing these subsystems with the same attributes as a GPU program and computing it in a massively parallel manner, it is demonstrated that the GPU is able to achieve a significant speedup over multicore CPUs and its computation time incremental is much smaller when the MMC level scales up. The improved insight and accuracy of the proposed modeling methodology and the designed GPU program are validated at the system- and device-level by off-line commercial simulation tools.