High-Performance Implementation of Power Components on FPGA Platform

Recently, the utility electric grid has been facing many problems in power quality because of using power electronic devices for controlling most of the Alternating Current and Direct Current loads. Solving the issue of reactive power at the end-user side became more challenging because of the sudden changes in loads considering harmonics. This leads to many reactive power compensation system failures due to the use of mechanical switching mechanisms which became useless in front of those sudden changes because of harmonics. In this paper, a solution is proposed to solve the aforementioned constraints. Moreover, a high-speed computation platform or field programmable gate array (FPGA) is used to measure and calculate voltages, currents, harmonic components, total harmonic distortion, active and reactive electrical power depending on distortion and displacement factors. The Xilinx Vivado high-level synthesis tool is used to implement the created design on the targeted FPGA device. The proposed approach can be used to determine the required design specification of the hardware that is suitable for real-time applications of any electric power analyzer that uses FPGA boards along with the proposed optimization algorithms. Experimental results validate the advantages of the proposed optimizing approach with approximately up to 15 folds of improvements when it is compared to a regular non-optimized design.