Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The electric power grid is facing momentous challenges that require advanced real-time simulation technologies to understand and solve. Modern electrical power systems are large-scale nonlinear structures that are constantly evolving from one operating state to another. Simulation is an integral part of power system planning, design, operation, and control, to ensure the safety, reliability, and high quality of electrical power supplied to consumers. Besides simulating a complex computational model at high speed, modern real-time digital simulators are capable of instantaneous communication with external hardware through high resolution input-output interfaces. Thus a protective relay or a digital controller can be connected to a real-time simulator in a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration and fully tested before being installed in the power system. Significant advances have been made recently in parallel processing technologies related, in particular, to reconfigurable parallel hardware such as the field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and massively parallel processors such as graphics processor units (GPUs). This project intends to exploit FPGA and GPU technologies to develop highly accurate and efficient real-time models for the simulation large-scale electric power systems. The main objectives of this research project are as follows: (1) To develop real-time models and methods for large-scale electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation on multiple FPGAs. (2) To develop real-time models and methods for large-scale transient stability (TS) simulation on multiple GPUs. (3) To validate the FPGA-based and GPU-based real-time simulation results against existing off-line and sequential real-time simulation tools for realistic large-scale test power systems. There are significant benefits to Canada and the supporting organization from this project. Researchers trained in this project will be valuable asset to the Canadian power industry.