With the rapid growth of electricity demand, in the past few decades, the power system has developed into centralized power generation, long-distance transmission of large-scale Internet systems. But with the increasing scale of the grid, the drawbacks of the ultra-large-scale power system are also increasingly prominent: high cost, difficult to run, environmental pollution. 

In response to this series of questions and challenges, the concept of microgrid was presented at the beginning of this century. As a new technical field, the microgrid is consists of distributed power supply, energy storage device, energy conversion device, related load and monitoring and protection device. It's a small power distribution system, and also a self-control, protection and management of the autonomous system. 

In order to meet a variety of power quality requirements, improve power supply reliability and other needs, researchers mainly focus on technologies as micro-grid control, micro-grid protection, micro-grid access standards, micro-power and so on. Traditional way is to construct a scale-down micro-grid system. However, due to the flexible structure of micro-grid, the traditional way is not working.

ModelingTech provide a system technology that utilizing multi-core CPU, FPGA hardware and also the highly optimized simulation method to simulate micro-grid system. This researching and testing method has been widely used.

StarSim Solution

StarSim is a graphical modeling tool which could easily model power and power electronics systems. And MT Real-Time simulation platform allows users to download StarSim models (or 3rd party models) directly to the hardware with I/O interfaces. There are 2 ways to simulate micro-grid system.
1. Hardware-In-the-Loop Micro-grid System
2. Power HIL Micro-grid System

1. Hardware-In-the-Loop Micro-grid System
Below is an illustration of Micro-grid HIL system. On the left side is a standard micro-grid system consists of PV system, wind power system, battery, electrical car charging system and loads. On the right side is a NI cRIO controller working as the EMS controller.

The platform is suitable for micro-grid structure and the Energy Management System (EMS) research and testing, detailed case please refer to the bottom of the page related content recommended.

2. Power HIL Micro-grid System

The traditional way of building and testing a scale-down power system has some advantages in the real and reliability of its object. However, in the study of micro-network system, this research method is very expensive, and also lack of flexibility. 

In order to have the advantages of both real power system and digital simulation system, we could set up a power HIL system of micro-grid. Below is an illustration. 

The real-time target simulates micro-grid system, through the power amplifier, connects to the real power system. 

This system is suitable for real micro-grid control, operation, testing, teaching and so on.