Detailed Multi-Domain Modeling and Faster-Than-Real-Time Hardware Emulation of Small Modular Reactor for EMT Studies

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are gaining significant attention as a promising solution to address the global energy demand and simulation is pivotal in expediting the construction of SMRs. However, the point-reactor neutron-kinetics equations of SMRs are strongly stiff nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs), which poses a great difficulty for numerical computation of electromagnetic transients (EMT) of power systems coupled with SMRs. In this paper, a semi-analytical solution is proposed to streamline the comprehensive SMR mathematical model and reduce the model order from 25th to 18th. Additionally, the conglomeration of selected SMR-based EMT power system benchmark, which includes synchronous machines (SMs), modular multilevel converters (MMCs), power distribution networks, and varying loads, is described in detail and implemented on the Xilinx VCU 118 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) real-time transient emulation platform. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in computational speed and stability achieved by the proposed solution, which achieves a computational accuracy of IEEE 32-bit single-precision floating-point numbers, with a minimum calculation interval of 800 ns, resulting in a remarkable 12.5-fold acceleration in faster-than-real-time (FTRT) performance. This advancement greatly facilitates the simulation of intricate SMR-based models for EMT studies.