Fast simulation of power electronic systems by partitioning, segmentation and caching

This paper describes an implementation and experimental results of a simulation framework for accelerated simulation of power electronic systems. The proposed method for accelerating the simulation exploits the differences in time-constants for different parts of the system by applying partitioning, time-segmentation and caching techniques. The framework is built around industry-standard simulation engines. The acceleration techniques are evaluated on a industrial IPM motor system with driver and controller. The driver includes an electronic circuit consisting of more than one hundred components, which is modelled in SPICE with full accuracy. The experimental results indicate that a significant speed-up can be achieved by the proposed techniques, but results depend heavily on the parameters of the simulation and the required accuracy. For the benchmark simulation scenario, a speed-up of a factor 45 was obtained.