Geographically distributed thermo-electric co-simulation of all-electric ship

In this paper, a thermo-electric co-simulation of an all-electric ship type notional system using two geographically distributed heterogeneous real-time simulators is presented. The two real-time simulators, from RTDS and OPAL-RT, are used for modeling the electrical system and the thermal system of an all-electric ship, respectively. RTDS is located at the Center for Advanced Power Systems, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA whereas the OPAL-RT simulator is located in the RTX-Lab at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. The two simulators separated by approximately 3500 km, exchange data through an asynchronous link over the Internet utilizing the TCP/IP and UDP protocols. The electrical model was developed using RSCAD and simulated on RTDS while the thermal model was developed using SIMULINK and simulated in the RT-LAB environment. RTDS sends the electrical power losses to the OPAL-RT simulator, which computes the temperatures of the thermal systems and sends the data back to the RTDS simulator. Simulation results indicate that despite the large physical distance between the two simulators, the co-simulation is accurate and stable. A low latency of 0.208 s was observed which is within acceptable limits for a slow system response expected from the thermal system, which has time constants in the range of seconds. Results indicate that co-simulation of different types of systems is a viable and may be a cost-effective option to perform remote hardware-in-the-loop simulation of complex multi-engineering models.