A fully digital real-time power system simulator based on PC-cluster Original Research Article

Many benefits come with the real-time simulation of electric machinery and drives. HYPERSIM, a fully digital real-time power system simulator, originally based on large parallel supercomputer, is now adapted to a new hardware platform, in order to increase its flexibility and accessibility. This paper presents a new hardware architecture, called PC-cluster, for real-time simulation of complex power system networks, including power electronics. A PC-cluster consists of several commodity PC interconnected with high-speed network. This new hardware platform for the HYPERSIM simulator is completely based on components-off-the-shelf (COTS), such as commercial motherboard, PCI input/output (I/O) board and communication board. The general implementation of the real-time parallel simulator is introduced in this paper. All aspects of the simulation, such as communication, calculation, synchronization, I/O access and acquisition, are presented in detail. To evaluate the performance of the new hardware platform in a real simulation, a complete application of electric machine drive is presented. This new hardware technology is bringing interesting benefits to power system engineers. It is now easier to have access to powerful simulation tools, in order to perform precise and complete power system studies.