Design and implementation of the MMC simulation system in the heterogeneous FPGA‐CPU platform. Issue 16 (13th February 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Li, Xiongfei; Mu, Qing; Zhang, Xing; Xiang, Yinxing; Li, Qiao; He, Guanghui
• Is Part Of: Journal of engineering. Volume 2019:Issue 16(2019)
• Page Start: 1721
• Page End: 1725
• Publication Date: 2019-02-13
• Subjects: field programmable gate arrays -- voltage‐source convertors -- microprocessor chips -- equivalent circuits -- circuit optimisation; offline simulation -- heterogeneous FPGA‐CPU platform -- modular multilevel converter -- large‐scale power electronics research -- real‐time MMC simulation system -- heterogeneous computing platform -- field programmable gate array -- MMC circuits -- alternative circuit equivalent model -- MMC bridge arm -- peripheral circuit -- timing optimisation strategy -- timing target requirement -- central processing unit -- Xilinx Virtex‐7 XC7VX690T FPGA -- electromagnetic transient program -- time 2.0 mus; Engineering -- Periodicals; Engineering; Electronic journals; Periodicals; 620.005
• DOI: 10.1049/joe.2018.8583
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2051-3305

Abstract

Abstract : Real‐time simulation of a modular multilevel converter (MMC) plays an important role on the area of large‐scale power electronics research. The authors propose a real‐time MMC simulation system in a heterogeneous computing platform containing the central processing unit (CPU) and field programmable gate array (FPGA). This system decouples the MMC circuits from the grid based on the alternative circuit equivalent model of the MMC bridge arm. Furthermore, the parallel calculation of the equivalent circuits is achieved when the peripheral circuit is realised on the CPU and the MMC arms are realised on FPGA. In addition, a timing optimisation strategy is discussed to reach the timing target requirement. To validate the MMC simulation system, a case study of a grid with 12 MMC bridges and 640 sub‐modules per bridge at 2 μs time step on Xilinx Virtex‐7 XC7VX690T FPGA is simulated in real time. The real‐time simulation results demonstrate high accuracy of the simulation system in comparison to the offline simulation of the original system in the electromagnetic transient program and our design is competitive to recent published works.