Real-time digital simulator with digital/analog conversion interface for testing power instruments

The need for real-time simulation stems from the fact that in many practical situations it is desirable to analyze the dynamic behavior of a large power system with advanced equipment that has complex and high-speed performance. Analog simulators are effective, however they impose serious limitations on the size of the system that is being modeled. The authors have studied and developed a real-time digital simulator using a hypercube computer, and realized real-time performance available for the analysis of large power systems. As the second step of the study, they developed a digital/analog conversion interface for testing actual power instruments. The interface exchanges the variables of fundamental frequency domain in the real-time digital simulator, and the variables of exact time domain in the analog equipment connected to the simulator. In this paper, the authors describe the detail of the digital/analog conversion interface of the real-time digital simulator for testing advanced power instruments. Its conversion algorithm, system configuration of the simulator with the interface, and experimental results are also presented