Speedy claims for electric drive simulator

Opal-RT Technologies has successfully demonstrated that the RT-Lab Electric Drive Simulator is the world's fastest and most precise real-time simulator of electrical systems.

Opal-RT Technologies has successfully demonstrated that the RT-Lab Electric Drive Simulator, installed this month at Mitsubishi Electric Company in Japan, is the world's fastest and most precise real-time simulator of electrical systems.

Based on RT-Lab and Simulink software, the real-time electrical simulator can simulate a complete AC motor drive with a sampling time below 10us, with an effective precision better than 1us, thanks to the use of the fastest Pentium 4 Xeon dual-processor shared memory boards, a unique real-time interpolation algorithm and fast Xilinx FPGA reconfigurable I/Os.

Electrical drive systems with PWM carrier frequencies as high as 10kHz, used for machine tools and hybrid electrical vehicle applications, can now be simulated accurately enabling the design and testing of advanced control systems, by connecting the controller in closed loop with the simulator, saving the time to build costly prototypes.

Furthermore, several processor boards can be interconnected, through the use of fast and ultra-low-latency serial communication systems, to simulate complex distributed power generation and distribution systems found in large off-highway trucks, military vehicles, trains, ships, wind turbine farms and industrial systems, using high-power multi-power convertors connected or not to the power grid.

The fastest electric drive simulator started to operate this month at Mitsubishi in Japan for the real-time simulation of AC motor drive, including a permanent synchronous motor, an IGBT inverter, an internal PWM controller used for testing and several I/O channels, analogue, and digital both static and time-stamped with a 10ns resolution.

"This achievement represents a major milestone for us, and opens the way for testing of electrical systems that could not be simulated before", said Jean Belanger, President of Opal-RT Technologies.

"We are proud to welcome Mitsubishi as one of a growing number of customers who have acknowledged that only RT-Lab engineering simulators can deliver the performance and precision needed for this type of application".

As well as Mitsubishi Electric, this powerful, scalable and affordable distributed real-time simulation technology is now being used by Toyota and Hitachi in Japan, and General Electric in the USA, China and India.

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