Real-time digital simulation of power electronics systems with Neutral Point Piloted multilevel inverter using FPGA

Most of actual real time simulation platforms have practically about ten microseconds as minimum calculation time step, mainly due to computation limits such as processing speed, architecture adequacy and modeling complexities. Therefore, simulation of fast switching converters’ instantaneous models requires smaller computing time step. The approach presented in this paper proposes an answer to such limited modeling accuracies and computational bandwidth of the currently available digital simulators.As an example, the authors present a low cost, flexible and high performance FPGA-based real-time digital simulator for a complete complex power system with Neutral Point Piloted (NPP) three-level inverter. The proposed real-time simulator can model accurately and efficiently the complete power system, reducing costs, physical space and avoiding any damage to the actual equipment in the case of any dysfunction of the digital controller prototype. The converter model is computed at a small fixed time step as low as 100 ns. Such a computation time step allows high precision account of the gating signals and thus avoids averaging methods and event compensations. Moreover, a novel high performance model of the NPP three-level inverter has also been proposed for FPGA implementation. The proposed FPGA-based simulator models the environment of the NPP converter: the dc link, the RLE load and the digital controller and gating signals. FPGA-based real time simulation results are presented and compared with offline results obtained using PLECS software. They validate the efficiency and accuracy of the modeling for the proposed high performance FPGA-based real-time simulation approach. This paper also introduces new potential FPGA-based applications such as low cost real time simulator for power systems by developing a library of flexible and portable models for power converters, electrical machines and drives.