Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation of Power Drives with RT-LAB

Abstract

This paper presents the RT-LAB Electrical Drive Simulator technology along with practical applications. The RT-LAB simulation software enables the parallel simulation of power drives and electric circuits on clusters of PC running QNX or RT-Linux operating systems at sample time below 10 μs. Using standard Simulink models including SimPowerSystems models, RT-LAB build computation and communication tasks necessary to make parallel simulation of electrical systems with standard off-the-shelf PCs and communication links like InfiniBand. To accommodate the high bandwidth of electrical systems, the RT-LAB Electrical Drive Simulator comes with special Simulink-based modeling tools, namely ARTEMIS and RT-Events that permits real-time simulation of electrical systems at practical time step of 10 μs but with sub-μs equivalent precision through the use of interpolation techniques. For power drives with even higher bandwidth, RT-LAB XSG permits simulation of PMSM drive at 1 μs on FPGA with VHDL code generated from Xilinx System Generator.