A General FPGA-Based Accelerated Solver for Electromagnetic Transient Simulations

The rising integration of renewable energy sources and power electronic converters in modern power grids imposes increasingly stringent requirements on electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation in terms of both precision and computational speed. Conventional simulation tools face significant challenges in efficiently modeling large-scale systems with multi-timescale dynamics. To overcome these constraints, this paper presents a general-purpose accelerator for offline EMT simulation based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. The proposed solver enhances computational performance by unifying component models and streamlining the accumulation calculation procedure, thereby substantially reducing FPGA processing latency and improving hardware resource utilization. Furthermore, a CPU-FPGA heterogeneous simulation framework is developed, capitalizing on the respective strengths of CPUs in handling complex control logic and FPGAs in executing parallel computations, to enable accelerated EMT simulation for generic, complex system models. The validity and efficiency of the proposed FPGA-based accelerator are demonstrated through a case study of a grid-connected photovoltaic system. Comparative evaluations against a CPU-only simulation platform confirm excellent agreement in results under both steady-state and transient operating conditions.