All-Electric Ship

Model-Based Design and Simulation of Onboard Power Systems for All-Electric Ships

All-electric ships (AES) and hybrid solutions typically include an integrated power system (IPS) connecting power sources, loads, energy storage systems, and electric propulsion modules (EPM) in a zonal electrical distribution system.

The vast complexity of such marine power systems requires a thorough evaluation and validation phase and performing integration tests and simulations to guarantee the interaction of many electronic parts before building the actual ship.

The model-based design approach helps to accelerate the development of the controls in these large-scale projects, identifies design flaws early, and significantly reduces the time for commissioning and testing the actual prototype.

“With Simulink, Simscape, and HDL Coder, we can develop plant models and deploy them directly to an FPGA for HIL tests; it’s a no-nonsense, no-compromise way to simulate large-scale power electronics systems.“

Henry Brengel, Leonardo DRS

Simulation and Testing of Onboard Electrification Solutions

Real-time simulation is needed to obtain accurate results when emulating complex power systems, including the high-dynamic behavior of components like converters, breakers, and loads.

Simulink^® Real-Time™, combined with Simscape™ Electrical™, simplifies real-time simulations of transient behaviors in power systems, including faults or sudden load changes.

Using MathWorks^® tools, together with Speedgoat hardware, enables you to integrate multi-domain physical components seamlessly in a single workflow.

Possible simulation and test scenarios are:

Stability of the onboard power distribution system
Energy management strategy (EMS)
Control of hybrid energy storage systems (HESS) with batteries and ultra-capacitors
Load-scheduling and -balancing
Centralized power management system (PMS) controlling all involved parts
Virtual commissioning
Training platform for operators

Multi-core support:

Distribute any large-scale plant model to several CPU cores benefiting from parallel computation.

Assign different sample rates to each section of your multi-domain simulation model, including thermal and mechanical processes with slow-moving behaviors and high-switching electrical components.

Hardware-in-the-Loop:

Develop and validate controller software by simulating plant components such as sensors or actuators on the real-time target machine and test any possible fault conditions that would be too costly or even harmful when performing on your actual equipment.

⮕ Learn more about HIL Simulation

Fault Scenarios:

Reduce commissioning time and prepare your system for the final marine certification by testing all possible operational scenarios, including system faults and component degradation, to validate the power system's behavior at an early project stage.

⮕ See our fault insertion I/O modules

Resources

Electric Ship Modeling and Simulation Webinar:

Learn how to model electric ship architectures by leveraging multi-domain physical modeling with Simscape Electrical™ and Simulink^® Real-Time™ on a proven example of a Two-Zone MVDC Shipboard Power System.

⮕ Learn more

Two-Zone-MVDC-Electric-Ship Simulink Model:

Download the Simulink^® model of a Two-Zone MVDC Shipboard Power System to get direct insight on the possibilities of real-time simulation and testing of electric ship architectures and how the model-based workflow can accelerate your development projects.

⮕ Learn more

Research on controlling load fluctuations for all electric ships using Simulink Real-Time and Speedgoat:

Learn more about how Speedgoat solutions helped the University of Michigan research an energy management strategy for load fluctuation in all-electric ships by using real-time model predictive control.

⮕ Learn more

Product Highlights

Real-Time Simulation and Testing

See how it works, learn more about Rapid Control Prototyping and Hardware-in-the-Loop simulation,
to design control designs and test controller hardware.