Grant: Engage Grants Program

Real-time digital simulation places severe demands on the simulation time-step that can be used, stipulatingthat such a time-step be much smaller than the natural frequency of the fastest dynamics in the simulatedsystem. This demand becomes problematic since the computations performed at each time-step can only becarried out in a finite time period, which may be longer than the minimum time-step necessitated by thereal-time simulation. Unfortunately, this is typically the case for many multi-level converters and theircontrollers, where their complexity coupled with the latency barrier in the conventional computing platformsmakes real-time simulation unfeasible.To address this problem, a new trend is to use reconfigurable platforms with Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGAs), instead of the conventional microprocessor-based platforms. In the former, the system is decoupledinto several sub-systems, and a delay element is used between these sub-systems to coordinate the flow ofsignals. This effectively models the delay-free system (which is physically a delay-free system) as a systemwith delays and may lead to instability in the real-time simulations. This proposal addresses this via a novelmodeling methodology for the sub-systems with much improved accuracy and stability properties.Kylowave Inc. is a small high-tech company, based in Ottawa and founded in 2007, provides software,hardware, firmware and integration services for the simulation and computer aided design automation of thenext generation of products developed by the aerospace/defense, cleantech/energy and automotive markets. Todevelop their products further, Kylowave needs the expertise of university-based researchers at UOIT who areexperts in the art of real-time digital simulation.