Papers by Jean-Nicolas Paquin
Abstract - Today, the development and integration of train and ship controllers is a more difficu... more Abstract - Today, the development and integration of train and ship controllers is a more difficult task than ever. Emergence of high-power switching devices has enabled the development of new solutions with improved controllability and efficiency. It has also increased the ...
Designing an all-electric ship (AES) requires testing of the interaction between hundreds of inte... more Designing an all-electric ship (AES) requires testing of the interaction between hundreds of interconnected power electronic subsystems built by different manufacturers. Such integration tests require large analog test benches or the use of actual equipment during system commissioning. Fully digital simulators can also be used to perform Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) integration tests to evaluate the performance of some parts of these very complex systems. This approach, in use for decades in the automotive and aerospace industries, can significantly reduce the costs, duration and risks related to the use of actual equipment to conduct integration tests. However the computational power required to conduct detailed simulation of such diverse and numerous power electronic components can only be achieved through the use of distributed parallel supercomputers, optimized for hard real-time performance with jitter in the order of a few microseconds. Such supercomputers have traditionally been built using expensive custom computer boards. This paper presents the technology and performance achieved by the eMEGAsim real-time digital simulator, which is capable of meeting these challenges through the use of standard commercial INTEL quad-core computers interconnected by DOLPHIN SCI communication fabric. The precision achieved in the simulation of a detailed power electronic model implemented with SIMULINK and SimPowerSystems, and executed in parallel with RT-LAB, will also be presented using a typical basic AES configuration. Furthermore, AES design implies the collaboration between several multidisciplinary teams using different tools to simulate all electrical, mechanical and fluid dynamic subsystems. The ORCHESTRA real-time co-simulation publish-and-subscribe framework enabling the integration of multi-domain simulation tools will also be presented.
This paper describes a versatile, multi-domain, large power grid real-time digital simulator. Its... more This paper describes a versatile, multi-domain, large power grid real-time digital simulator. Its ability to conduct multiple tests for protection coordination studies is described. A large grid model built using the EMTP-RV software and simulated in real-time using the eMEGAsim platform's EMTP-RT software tool is described. A discussion and comparisons on the different solvers offered with both simulation environments are made. Comparisons between offline and Real-Time simulations are made using superimposed fault condition waveforms. Finally, multiple random tests are performed on the featured power system model and analyzed using the eMEGAsim simulator's software package.
This paper describes the detailed modeling and simulation of a wind farm composed of eight doubly... more This paper describes the detailed modeling and simulation of a wind farm composed of eight doubly-fed induction generators (DFIG) connected to a 24-bus electrical network. Once built, the model was brought to real-time using the eMEGAsim, a Simulink-based, distributed real-time simulator of electrical power systems. Then, analysis of the steady-state and transient response of the system is made. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion on the off-line performance and the real-time performance on the eMEGAsim simulator.
This paper presents specifications for the real-time simulation of switched reluctance motor (SRM... more This paper presents specifications for the real-time simulation of switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives using standard CPUs and FPGAs as computational engines. CPU-based real-time simulation results of a 60-kW current-controlled 6/4 SRM are presented. The SRM is fed by a three-phase unidirectional power converter having three legs, each of which consists of two IGBTs and two free-wheeling diodes. The real-time simulation of the drive is conducted on the RT-LAB real-time simulation platform using Simulink/SimPowerSystems, SRM models and a switching function approach for the inverter. Since the converter is current-controlled, the simulator latency is critical to achieving good accuracy and to avoiding current overshoot. The paper demonstrates that this type of drive can be simulated in real-time at a time-step of 15 mus with good accuracy. A specification is also presented to implement the SRM motor in a FPGA core. An FPGA implementation of the SRM model has the great advantage of very low computational time (estimated at 250 nanoseconds) and minimal total hardware-in-the-loop latency just above 1 microsecond.
Today, the development and integration of train and ship controllers is a more difficult task tha... more Today, the development and integration of train and ship controllers is a more difficult task than ever. Emergence of high-power switching devices has enabled the development of new solutions with improved controllability and efficiency. It has also increased the necessity for more stringent test and integration capabilities since these new topologies come with less design experience on the part of the system designers. To address this issue, a real-time simulator can be a very useful tool to test, validate and integrate the various subsystems of modern rail vehicle devices. This paper presents such a real-time simulator, based on commercial-off-the-shelf PC technology, suitable for the simulation of train and ship propulsion devices. The requirements for rail/water vehicle test and integration reaches several levels on the control hierarchy from low-level power electronic converters used for propulsion and auxiliary systems to high-level supervisory controls. This paper places great emphasis on the real-time simulation of several high-power drives used for train and ship propulsion, including a multi-induction machine drive, a three-level GTO - PMSM drive and a high-power thyristor-based converter - synchronous machine drive. All models are designed first with the SimPowerSystems blockset and then automatically compiled and run on commercial PCs under RT-LAB. Interfaces to I/O are also made at the Simulink model level without any low-level coding required by the user. Supervisory control integration and testing can also be made using the RT-LAB real-time simulator. The other objective of this paper is to demonstrate that HIL testing of complex drives, such as the those found on trains, can be done using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software and hardware and model-based design techniques that only require high-level system models suitable for system specifications down to controller test and final system integration.
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Papers by Jean-Nicolas Paquin