RWTH-RTlab

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Real-Time Lab (RWTH Aachen University)

TA26 – RWTH-RTlab 

Location

Mathieustraße 10

52074 Aachen,  Germany 

Description

The RWTH-ACS Real-time Lab is located in the E.ON Energy Research Centre (E.ON ERC) and operated by the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems (ACS). As part of the E.ON ERC, ACS is one of the four Institutes out of the three faculties of the RWTH Aachen University. The E.ON ERC is the result of a public-private partnership between industry and the scientific community.

As one of the largest energy companies in Europe, E.ON SE has come together with the internationally renowned RWTH Aachen University in order to realise this unique project. The E.ON ERC is located in the Sustainable Energy Cluster of the RWTH Campus.

Testing Capabilities

The main function of the ACS laboratory infrastructure is to support fast prototyping of control systems and derisk new control architectures for application in power systems. This is achieved through a set of real-time (RT) simulators and hardware interfaces. Considering that its research focus is on complex systems, and understanding that simulating different systems and situations may require different hardware and software solutions, it is impossible to choose one single platform for the real-time simulator that fulfils all the requirements. Thus, they have designed a laboratory structure that accounts for all the scenarios of interest and satisfies all our foreseeable needs. The ACS real-time laboratory offers a large amount of real-time simulation capacity provided by commercial as well as in-house developed power system simulators. A special feature lies in the ability to interconnect commercial real-time simulators to local and remote testbenches. The in-house developed VILLAS framework provides FPGA-based cross-vendor co-simulations as well as integration into high-performance computing clusters.

Technical Equipment

Digital Real-time Simulators:

  • RTDS Simulator (6x Racks @ 4 GPC cards,4x GTNET, licenses for all available IO protocols and highspeed Aurora links to HPC and OPAL targets)
  • 1 OPAL-RT Simulator (1x OP5707xg target with eHS 64, licenses for eMEGASIM and eFPGASIM, IEC61850, Aurora, RS-485 IO protocols)

C-HIL/P-HIL:

  • Xilinx FPGAs (1x Virtex 7 VC707, 1x Virtex6 ML605, 2x Virtex5 ML507)
  • National Instruments (SBrio & Crio, LabVIEW Real-time and FPGA targets)
  • Alstom PMUs
  • ABB substation automation equipment

High-Performance Computing:

  • 4x HPC clusters with 4 nodes each (total of 233 physical cores with 1280 GiB of memory
  • FDR/EDR Infiniband Interconnect (up to 100 Gpbs)
  • 5x NVidia Tesla GPGPUs
  • 3x Intel Xeon Phi Accelerators

Private Cloud Computing:

  • Private Openstack Cloud installation
  • Consisting of 9x compute, 1x storage, 1x controller nodes (total of 288 physical / 2048 virtual cores, 1408 GiB memory, 64 TiB storage)
  • 20 Gpbs Highspeed connection to DFN/Geant Research Networks

Additional information

Technology Readiness Level: 7 or above

Special considerations: N/A 

Technology clusters: Energy Storage, Information and Communication Technologies, Integrated Grids, PV

Website: http://www.acs.eonerc.rwth-aachen.de

Availability: All year

Provision of tools to prepare data sets in a FAIR way:  Yes 

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