Opal-RT Delivers the World's Fastest, Most Precise Real-time Electrical System Simulator to Mitsubishi, Toyota and Hitachi

Opal-RT Technologies Inc. (www.opal-rt.com), the world leader in distributed simulation on PC-based platforms, today announced that they have successfully demonstrated that the RT-LAB Electric Drive Simulator, installed this month at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan, is the world's fastest and most precise real-time simulator of electrical systems.

Based on RT-LAB and Simulink software, the real-time electrical simulator can simulate a complete AC motor drive with a sampling time below 10 µs, with an effective precision better than 1 µs, due to the use of the fastest Pentium 4 Xeon dual-processor shared memory boards, a unique real-time interpolation algorithm and fast Xilinx FPGA reconfigurable I/Os. Electrical drive systems with PWM carrier frequencies as high as 10 kHz, used for machine tools and hybrid electrical vehicle applications, can now be simulated accurately enabling the design and testing of advanced control systems, by connecting the controller in closed loop with the simulator, saving the time to build costly prototypes.

Furthermore, several processor boards can be interconnected, through the use of fast and ultra-low latency serial communication systems, to simulate complex distributed power generation and distribution systems found in large off-highway trucks, military vehicles, trains, ships, wind turbine farms and industrial systems, using high-power multi-power converters connected or not to the power grid.

The fastest electric drive simulator started to operate this month at Mitsubishi in Japan for the real-time simulation of AC motor drive, including a permanent synchronous motor, an IGBT inverter, an internal PWM controller used for testing and several I/O channels, analog, and digital both static and time-stamped with a 10 nanosecond resolution.

"This achievement represents a major milestone for us, and opens the way for testing of electrical systems that could not be simulated before", said Jean Blanger, President of Opal-RT Technologies Inc., "We are proud to welcome Mitsubishi as one of a growing number of customers who have acknowledged that only RT-LAB Engineering Simulators can deliver the performance and precision needed for this type of application."

As well as Mitsubishi Electric, this powerful, scalable and affordable distributed real-time simulation technology is now being used by Toyota and Hitachi in Japan, and General Electric in the US, China and India.