FPGA-based real-time EMTP

Abstract

Real-time transient simulation of large transmission networks requires significant computational power. This paper proposes a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based real-time electromagnetic transient simulator. Taking advantage of the inherent parallel architecture, high density, and high clock speed, the real-time EMTP is implemented on a single FPGA chip. It is based on a paralleled algorithm that is deeply pipelined, and uses a floating-point arithmetic calculation to achieve high accuracy for simulating fast electromagnetic transients. To validate the new simulator, an example system with 15 transmission lines using full frequency-dependent modeling is simulated in real-time. A time-step of 12 microseconds has been achieved based on a 12.5 nanosecond clock period with a high data throughput. The captured real-time oscilloscope results demonstrate excellent accuracy of the simulator in comparison to the off-line simulation of the original system in the ATP version of EMTP.