Rapid prototyping of control systems from electromagnetic transient simulator program

The traditional approach to designing FACTS and HVDC system controls, are to run electromagnetic transients (EMT) simulations of the power network and the proposed controller strategy. After the design is completed, the controls can be re-implemented in hardware. However, prototyping the controls from EMT programs into a microcontroller platform is a long and arduous task. This paper reports on an automatic control generation strategy, which converts the controls developed in an EMT simulation, into C code for a microcontroller. The code generator is developed for a commonly used EMT simulation program (PSCAD/EMTDC). The viability of this approach is demonstrated by the construction of a hardware based step-down dc-dc converter, with the controls being implementing on a PIC microcontroller using the proposed approach.