PC Implementation of a Real-Time Simulator Using ATP Foreign Models and a Sound Card

This work reports the personal computer implementation of a real-time simulator based on the widely used Electromagnetic Transients Program, version Alternative Transients Program (EMTP-ATP) software for testing protection and control devices. The proposed simulator was implemented on a conventional PC with a GNU/Linux operative system including a real-time kernel. Using foreign models programmed in C, ATP was recompiled with the PortAudio (sound card I/O library) with tools for writing and reading the parallel port. In this way, the sound card was used as a digital-to-analog converter to generate voltage waveform outputs at each simulation time step of the ATP, and the parallel port was used for digital inputs and outputs, resulting in a real-time simulator that can interact with protection and control devices by means of hardware-in-the-loop tests. This work uses the minimum possible hardware requirements to try to implement a real-time simulator. Due to the limitation of two channels, this simulator was used mainly to demonstrate the implementation methodology concept at this stage; this concept could potentially be expanded with more powerful hardware to improve its performance. The performance of the implemented simulator was analyzed through interactions with a real intelligent electronic device (IED). Furthermore, a comparison with the results obtained by means of the well-known real-time digital simulator (RTDS) was presented and discussed.