Real time simulation of power electronic systems on multi-core processors

Real-time simulation is an important issue in the design of power electronic systems, especially in the context of hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation. This paper is concerned with the development of a real-time simulation environment that is low-cost and can be easily set up in an educational laboratory. Any real-time simulation environment needs three essential components: a mechanism to accept a description of the system to be simulated, a digital hardware platform to carry out the simulation, and real-time software to manage the simulation. This paper addresses these three issues from the viewpoint of an educational laboratory setup. Real-time simulation has typically been carried out on complex and specialized multiprocessor systems, running dedicated real-time software. However, the current availability of low-cost, high-speed multi-core digital processor systems has made it possible to use standard computing hardware for this purpose. This has been aided further by the availability of real-time operating systems with multi-core execution capability. This paper discusses the issues involved in setting up a real-time simulator based on multi-core processors, and presents the details of an educational laboratory setup. As an example, the paper shows the simulation of an induction motor drive system. Experimental plots are presented. A timing analysis of the simulation is also presented, along with timing accuracy measurements.