We’re excited to share a recent collaborative project with GE Vernova: their new, world-class MMC-HVDC control and protection solution, eLumina™, has been successfully integrated into the real-time simulation environment with the RTDS Simulator’s GTSOC platform for black-box control.

We developed the GTSOC to address a key need in the market: a deterministic, convenient platform for integrating vendor controls into the real-time power system simulation while protecting the intellectual property of the manufacturer. Using vendor-specific controls rather than generic models improves the accuracy of the simulation, a particular challenge in networks that are rich in inverter-based resources and HVDC. The dynamic response of the power system increasingly depends on the fast-acting controls of power electronics; modelling these as accurately as possible is key for engineers to develop a good understanding of the system and to predict and mitigate vulnerabilities. Furthermore, when it comes to HVDC, physical replica controls are typically not available for testing early in the project cycle, so the GTSOC allows for early investigation into dynamic behaviour of HVDC controls, before the hardware is available.

These advantages motivated GE Vernova to work with RTDS Technologies to implement their eLumina solution on the GTSOC. Due to the inherent complexity of HVDC controls, the various tasks of GE Vernova’s source control code were distributed across the four ARM cores of the GTSOC, which communicate directly for efficiency. Two GTSOC units were required to model one monopole station’s associated controls and protection. Low-level firing was not included in the model; instead, the RTDS Simulator’s simplified MMC-HVDC valve model was used, which uses an average model for submodule capacitor voltage balancing. This level of detail is suitable for the typical system-level studies which are performed with the GTSOC.