Real-Time HIL Simulation of a Complete PMSM Drive at 10 μs Time Step Simon Abourida, Jean Bélanger, Christian Dufour, Opal-RT Technologies, Inc. 1751 Richardson, #2525 Montreal, Quebec, Canada Tel.: +1 / (514) – 935.23.23. Fax: +1 / (514) – 935.49.94. E-Mail: simon.abourida@opal-rt.com URL: http://www.opal-rt.com Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Masaya Harakawa and Tetsuaki Nagano from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, for their important contributions in the development and success of this project and for the tests made on the simulator and actual systems. Keywords « Real-time simulation », «Simulation », « AC Motor », « Drive », « Permanent magnet motor », «Modelling », « Test Bench » Abstract This paper presents the fastest-ever-reported, real-time (RT) simulation of an AC drive on PC-cluster. The RT simulator is used to simulate a complete PMSM drive circuit in a Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) application. It consists of a PMSM fed by a 3-phase IGBT inverter, a DC link capacitor and a 3-phase diode bridge. This drive model runs in RT and is connected to an external controller by analog and digital inputs and outputs for closed loop operation. The main innovation in this work is that the real-time simulation cycle is as low as 10 μs, which constitutes to our knowledge- the shortest RT simulation time step ever reported for electric drives with this level of details in modeling the drive circuit. Introduction For power electronics and motor drives, RT simulation is used as a step in the engineering process, either to simulate the complete system in RT, or to connect a part of the system to a RT digital model of the remaining part, in what it is commonly called Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) application. The most critical criterion in carrying out a RT transient simulation on digital systems can be expressed as follows: how to attain acceptable model accuracy with a simulation time-step that can be achieved with the available technology. This is especially a challenging task for the simulation of power electronics and motor drives. These highly non-linear switching topologies usually need very tiny time-steps to attain acceptable accuracy. Great enhancement of processing power and resources were achieved during the last two decades. But even with today’s fastest processors, practical time step achievable by high-end HIL simulators like RT-