A distributed object-oriented simulator framework for marine power plants with weak power grids

Abstract

In this work, we discuss and demonstrate how multi-engine marine power plants with weak power grids efficiently can be set up and simulated in a distributed co-simulation framework. To facilitate configuration switching such as starting and stopping, connecting and disconnecting arbitrary gensets online, the generator models are modelled as hybrid causality component models. This implementation enables seamless and energy conservative model switching. Also, the proposed simulator framework is scalable such that the number of gensets in the power plant can be set by a single parameter, which automatically scales the power management system and the tailored simulator master algorithm accordingly. To control the number of active gensets being connected to the power grid while running the simulation, a simple mixed integer linear programming formulation is proposed. A simulation case study including a marine power plant configuration with four equal-sized gensets is conducted in the end to demonstrate the features of the proposed simulator framework, which also can be applied to, e.g. a small wind farm, or an isolated number of islands with interconnected power generators.