StarSim 1.2 - A LabVIEW-based Real-Time Electrical System Simulation Software is released!

[Kevin_ModelingTech]

We are very pleased to announce that ModelingTech has released a new version StarSim. And we have upgraded StarSim to let it directly have the real-time simulation capabilities.

StarSim is a LabVIEW-based electrical system (power electronics, power system, etc) simulation tool. StarSim consists of two main components, StarSim Editor for creating system models, and StarSim Model Loader Express VI for converting models into the executable code. 

Real-Time Simulation for Hardware-in-the-loop Applications

StarSim’s key differentiator is that it can directly support the real time simulation on the NI PXI real-time controllers. Previously the power system real-time simulator is mainly built with vendors 'own proprietary hardware system, the whole system is usually very expensive. PXI is an industrial standard, commercial off the shelf (CTOS) hardware platform.  The PXI-based real-time simulator makes the real-time simulation technology more affordable for researchers and engineers.   

CPU and FPGA co-simulation for Power Electronics System Real-Time Simulation

The challenge of power electronics real-time simulation is that the very small step size (the range of microseconds) is required for the normal method to achieve accurate simulation results. But the current CPU-based real-time simulator usually can't achieve such small step size.  StarSim uses its own proprietary real-time converter bridge models and leverage FPGA technology to achieve the power electronics system real-time simulation.  A very fast loop on FPGA is for the PWM signal pre-processing. A loop with 50us-100 us step size on the CPU is for the main electrical system model.

StarSim's Real-time Simulation Performance:

StarSim is able to simulate a power system like below with 10kHz loop rate on a single core (2.1GHz) of PXI 8110 controller. This power system is a slighted modified Kundur system (a famous benchmark system).  It has 11 three-phase nodes. It has 4 synchronous generators, 4 three-phase transformers, a lot of power system transmission lines. The kind of simulation capability makes StarSim a professional-level real-time power system simulation tool. 

Multi-core Parallel Real-Time Simulation

For the big power system, the parallel computation is indispensable. In order to achieve the parallel computation, we should first be able to divide the system into the equivalent subsystems.  StarSim leverages the distributed line model to divide the big system into equivalent subsystems.  The ability to divide the big system into small equivalent subsystems is a very important difference between the real-time simulation software and the offline tools. 

After dividing the model, we can use LabVIEW to achieve the multi-core parallel real-time simulation. ModelingTech has successfully used multi-core PXI (8135, 8119, 8108 etc) to perform the parallel real-time power system simulation.

StarSim Installers:

StarSim Base (only supports the simulation running on Windows OS, mainly for verifying the LabVIEW control code) is available through NI web and NI Sales channel. 

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/211170

StarSim Real-Time Module Installer is required for the real-time simulation purpose. For the installer of StarSim Real-Time Module, please contact  info@modeling-tech.com  

Kevin Wang

ModelingTech Energy Technology Company