Implementation of a Real-Time Decoupling Approach for Power Networks on a Personal Computer

This work presents a method for simulating power networks in real-time on general purpose personal computers. Real-time simulation of power networks is a mature industry, with big players dominating the market. However, the implementation is limited to dedicated high-end hardware and software. This effort benefits the researcher and small-scale user who may wish to explore real-time applications without making a large investment. The approach offers further insight into the workings of real-time computing, in particular parallel processing using methods similar to the published description of the SSN method developed by OPAL-RT. The implementation of the developed method on a PC with multiple cores requires very little resources besides MATLAB/Simulink and a C++ development environment. The method was tested on the IEEE 123 bus system and found to require only three processing cores, where previous attempts on dedicated real-time hardware required five cores.