Real time simulator for hydro-generator excitation systems

This paper presents a real time digital simulator developed for testing hydro-generator static excitation systems in a hardware-in-the-loop approach. Thus, the complete excitation panel, including transducers, digital control loops, state sequencer and the thyristor pulse generation hardware can be tested. Any kind of synchronous machine, hydraulic turbine and electrical network can be represented. A large set of events can be simulated, from the machine startup process to triphase faults on the transmission lines. The simulator can be operated in two different modes. The online mode follows the hardware-in-the-loop scheme, where real time performance is required. The offline mode is a computer-only simulation system, which includes an emulation of the programmable logic controller software in addition to the hydro-generator static excitation system.