FPGA-Based Real-Time Simulation of Variable Speed AC Drive

Abstract

Sophisticated power electronic apparatus and their digital control systems are finding increasing applications in electric power systems at generation, transmission, distribution and utilization levels. It is essential to carry out rigorous performance evaluation of such apparatus before commissioning. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming an attractive platform for accelerating computationally intensive applications. This thesis presents a FPGA-based real-time digital simulator for power electronic drives based on realistic device characteristics. A 3-level 12-pulse Voltage Source Converter (VSC) fed induction machine drive is implemented on the FPGA. The system components include the 3-level VSC, the induction machine, the direct field oriented controller, and the pulse width modulator. Both system-level and device-level IGBT models are utilized to implement the VSC. The VSC model is computed at a fixed time-step of 12:5ns allowing an accurate representation of the IGBT nonlinear switching characteristics. Altera Startix EP1S80 and EP3SL150F1152C2 FPGA boards utilized for the real-time simulation. All models were implemented in VHDL. The FPGA boards were interfaced to external DAC boards to display real-time results on the oscilloscope. The real-time results were validated using an off-line cosimulation set-up using the SABER and MATLAB/SIMULINK software.