Parallel Electromagnetic Transient Simulation of Power Electronic Systems on Advanced Digital Hardware
Creators: Shang, Bingrong
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>Electromagnetic Transient (EMT) simulation is an essential tool for the analysis and design of power system components, such as power electronic converters, transformers, and transmission lines. It enables investigation of the dynamic behavior of power systems and power electronic converters under transient conditions, including circuit faults and interruptions in the system, as well as device stress and thermal behavior of power electronic converters during switching events. This thesis presents two contributions toward the efficient simulation of power electronic systems at the device-level and at the system-level based on the heterogeneous adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) and graphics processing unit (GPU). Both contributions were validated and compared against traditional simulation methods, providing effective and accurate means of simulating power electronic systems, and paving the way for the efficient and reliable design of modern energy systems.<br>
First, the nonlinear high-order electro-thermal model of the Insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is developed and then deployed onto the heterogeneous digital hardware for real-time implementation. As the complexity of the nonlinear behavioral model (NBM) of the IGBT poses a significant computational burden on real-time hardware emulation, machine learning (ML) methodology is utilized so that the trained model can reproduce the characteristics of its original counterpart as accurately as possible and then it is implemented on the ACAP, which comprises of the processing system (PS), programmable logic (PL), and Artificial Intelligent Engine (AIE). The vector multiplication feature of the AIE caters to mathematical operations of the ML-based model particularly well and consequently enables it to be executed in real-time with remarkable speedup over the original model with which matrix inversion is otherwise mandatory. Finally, the validation for real-time device-level results and system-level results of a multi-converter system is provided by SaberRD and MATLAB/Simulink.<br>
Second, a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link model based on the modular multilevel converter with embedded energy storage (MMC-EES) is proposed and, utilizing the massively parallel computing feature of the GPU, its efficacy in compensating a varying wind energy generation is studied. Constant power is oriented in the inverter control by incorporating a DC-DC converter with EES into its submodules. High-fidelity EMT modeling is conducted for insight into converter control and energy management. A fully iterative solution is carried out for the nonlinear model for high accuracy. Since the sequential data processing manner of the central processing unit (CPU) is prone to an extremely long simulation following an increase of component quantity with even one order of magnitude, the massively concurrent threading of the GPU is exploited. The computational challenges posed by the complexity of the MMC circuit are effectively tackled by circuit partitioning which separates nonlinearities. In the meantime, components of an identical attribute are designed as one kernel despite inhomogeneity. The proposed modeling and computing method is applied to a multi-terminal DC system with wind farms, and the accuracy is validated by offline simulation.</p>