Thermo-electric co-simulation on geographically distributed real-time simulators

In this paper, we report a combined electrical and thermal simulation carried out using two real-time digital simulators located approximately 3500 km from each other. The electrical model was developed on the RTDS simulator at the Center for Advanced Power Systems, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, while the thermal model was developed on an OPAL-RT simulator located in the RTX-Lab at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. The two simulators exchange data in an asynchronous mode on the Internet utilizing the TCP/IP and UDP protocols. Before running the actual thermo-electric co-simulation, a loop-back test was designed and run to investigate the accuracy, latency, and stability of the communication link. The loop-back test revealed a maximum latency of 0.1 s for transmitting a signal from one simulator to the other including all the communication and processing delays. Simulation results corroborate the fact that despite this latency, the thermo-electric co-simulation on geographically distributed real-time simulators can be performed with sufficient accuracy and stability.