FPGA-Based Real-Time Simulation of High-Power Electronic System with Nonlinear IGBT Characteristics

The hardware-in-the-loop simulation plays a vital role in the test of high-power electronic system. Although the application of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) embedded system has enabled the real-time system simulating below 500 ns, the transient characteristic of high-voltage insulated-gate bipolar transistor (HVIGBT) is largely compromised. In this paper, a new piecewise HVIGBT model, considering its driver circuit effect and parasite parameter, is proposed for FPGA-based real-time simulation applications. With the attempt to reduce the simulation latency, we propose an FPGA solver with a parallel structural to divide the system into several layers. The model could not only provide accurate system-level performance of the power electronic converter but also give an insight into the transient behavior effect of high-power electronic system. Finally, a case study about emulation of traction system of high-speed train is also presented. Implementations are made on an FPGA Kintex-7 embedded in National Instruments FlexRIO PXIe-7975. The obtained results show that the proposed modeling algorithm can achieve both accuracy and efficiency within a fixed real-time simulation time step of 25 ns.