PC Implementation of a Real-Time Simulator Using ATP Foreign Models and a Sound Card

Renzo G. Fabián Espinoza, Yuri Molina and Maria Tavares
Additional contact information
Renzo G. Fabián Espinoza: School of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), João Pessoa 58051-970, Paraíba, Brazil
Yuri Molina: School of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), João Pessoa 58051-970, Paraíba, Brazil
Maria Tavares: School of Electrical and Computing Engineering, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, São Paulo, Brazil

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-11

Abstract: This work reports the personal computer implementation of a real-time simulator based on the widely used Electromagnetic Transients Program, version Alternative Transients Program (EMTP-ATP) software for testing protection and control devices. The proposed simulator was implemented on a conventional PC with a GNU/Linux operative system including a real-time kernel. Using foreign models programmed in C, ATP was recompiled with the PortAudio (sound card I/O library) with tools for writing and reading the parallel port. In this way, the sound card was used as a digital-to-analog converter to generate voltage waveform outputs at each simulation time step of the ATP, and the parallel port was used for digital inputs and outputs, resulting in a real-time simulator that can interact with protection and control devices by means of hardware-in-the-loop tests. This work uses the minimum possible hardware requirements to try to implement a real-time simulator. Due to the limitation of two channels, this simulator was used mainly to demonstrate the implementation methodology concept at this stage; this concept could potentially be expanded with more powerful hardware to improve its performance. The performance of the implemented simulator was analyzed through interactions with a real intelligent electronic device (IED). Furthermore, a comparison with the results obtained by means of the well-known real-time digital simulator (RTDS) was presented and discussed.

Keywords: digital real-time simulation; hardware-in-the-loop; intelligent electronic device; ATP; MODELS; foreign models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/2140/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/2140/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:8:p:2140-:d:164106

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().