Quantitative Analysis of Accelerated Power Electronics Simulation Using Advanced Computing Technology

Abstract

Acceleration of execution speed in power electronics converters attracts increasing attention because of the advancement of power electronics technology and applications, such as high-frequency wide band-gap (WBG)-based power conversion, high-fidelity simulation needs over converter lifetime for reliability assessment on emerging mission-critical and/or cost-efficient applications, and future power and energy system enabled by multiple converters. However, simulation challenges show up due to high-frequency operation and resultant computational burden. This paper attempts to leverage the advanced computing technology, which has been successfully demonstrated in power system simulation, and performs the quantitative study to demonstrate the effectiveness of simulation acceleration. First, a methodology is proposed for a comprehensive comparison in a quantitative manner, starting from commercial MATLAB/Simulink software as the benchmark along with mathematical model (numerical and analytical version), Julia implementation, and improved model using paralleling computing techniques. Second, based on the proposed methodology, a case study with the widely applied two-level voltage source converter is performed and the comparison results are summarized. The impact of switching frequency is also investigated. It is observed that the simulation speeds up by a factor of 43.8 using advanced computing technology as compared to the MATLAB/Simulink benchmark.