Comprehensive Real-Time Hardware-In-the-Loop Transient Emulation of MVDC Power Distribution System on Nuclear Submarine

A nuclear submarine has significant performance advantages over the conventional diesel-electric submarine. Its powerful nuclear propulsion can be operated independently of air and does not
require refueling throughout the 25-year life span. Recent progresses of medium voltage direct current (MVDC) techniques applied in industry push the energy-saving and extremely long-time operation to a new stage with a feasible solution of smaller scale nuclear reactor embedded inside the vessel. Thus, there is a need to investigate the new MVDC-based nuclear submarine power distribution system and its real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) emulation to test the control systems, device stresses, etc. This paper proposes a comprehensive MVDC-based nuclear submarine power distribution system emulated in real-time on a multi-FPGA hardware platform with system-level transients (validated by Matlab/Simulink) at 20 microsecond time-step and device-level transients (validated by SaberRD) at 400 nanosecond time-step.