EMTP is an acronym for Electromagnetic

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Program. It is a software tool used by power systems engineers to analyse electromagnetic transients (generically "EMT") and associated insulation issues. It is also a trademark for the commercial version of EMTP. In 1964 in his Ph.D. thesis (

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; ) is a public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Established in 1868 by King Ludwig II ...

), Dr. Hermann Dommel used

Nodal analysis In electric circuit analysis, nodal analysis (also referred to as node-voltage analysis or the branch current method) is a method of determining the voltage between nodes (points where elements or branches connect) in an electrical circuit in ter ...

with the companion circuit model and the constant-parameter transmission line model, to simulate electromagnetic transients. The companion circuit model used the trapezoidal integration rule. At that time

Bonneville Power Administration The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is an American federal agency operating in the Pacific Northwest. BPA was created by an act of United States Congress, Congress in 1937 to market electric power from the Bonneville Dam located on the Col ...

also started to develop a computer software for studying switching overvoltages for insulation coordination. In 1966, Hermann Dommel was invited to BPA from Germany to work on the development of a software named Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP). The EMTP development was part of a project for the development of load-flow and stability analysis software at BPA. This project was directed by W. F. Tinney whose fundamental contributions to the solution of

sparse matrices In numerical analysis and scientific computing, a sparse matrix or sparse array is a matrix (mathematics), matrix in which most of the elements are zero. There is no strict definition regarding the proportion of zero-value elements for a matrix ...

enabled EMTP and other packages to simulate large power systems. In 1973 H. Dommel left BPA to become a professor at

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

. The development of EMTP was then taken over and significantly accelerated by W. Scott Meyer. W. Scott Meyer collaborated with various researchers & experts including A. Ametani, Vladimir Brandwajn, Laurent Dubé, José R. Marti, Adam Semlyen. In 1981, the Development Coordination Group (DCG) of EMTP was proposed and formed by BPA in which Hermann Dommel maintained his participation. Over the following years, several organizations became members of DCG-EMTP to contribute research, development and field tests. The list included:

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, AEP, CEA, CRIEPI, EDF, EPRI,

Hydro-Québec Hydro-Québec () is a Canadian Crown corporations of Canada#Quebec, Crown corporation public utility headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. It manages the electricity generation, generation, electric power transmission, transmission and electricity ...

Ontario Hydro Ontario Hydro, established in 1906 as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, was a publicly owned electricity utility in the Province of Ontario. It was formed to build transmission lines to supply municipal utilities with electricity ge ...

, US Bureau of Reclamation, Western Area Power Administration. EPRI joined the DCG in 1983. In 1984 BPA left the DCG and W. Scott Meyer continued independently and personally developing with the existing EMTP code under the new name EMTP-ATP in his free time. ATP is acronym of Alternative Transients Program being non-commercial and royalty-free version of EMTP. EMTP-ATP was then in 1987 available in Europe distributed by Leuven EMTP Center at the

KU Leuven KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its mai ...

(Katholieke Universiteit) as the first EMTP version running under operating system

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

on IBM XT/AT and compatible personal computers. The DCG pursued the development of EMTP with its members. Several full versions were released on mainframe computers and later

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

workstations. The development work was continued mainly by Vladimir Brandwajn, Jean Mahseredjian and L. Marti. In 1992, J. Mahseredjian, then working at IREQ (

) converted the EMTP code to work on

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and Windows 3.11. The first

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EMTP PC version was commercialized by

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. In 1996 a major EMTP version was released on

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. At that time it became acknowledged and urgent in the DCG to modernize the EMTP code and improve its numerical methods. In 1996 J. Mahseredjian proposed to the DCG to abandon the old EMTP code and to rewrite it from scratch using modern programming languages, and latest numerical methods. His demonstrations and prototypes triggered the EMTP recoding (restructuring) project. The EMTP recoding project started in 1998 by J. Mahseredjian. J. Mahseredjian worked later with a small team of developers, including mainly S. Dennetière, O. Saad, C. Dewhurst and Laurent Dubé, to deliver the new commercial version of EMTP, in 2003. It was then released under the version named EMTP-RV, RV meaning restructured version. This new commercial EMTP code introduced several major improvements in graphical user interface, programming practices and numerical methods. In 2004, J. Mahseredjian left IREQ to become a professor at

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. The DCG has been dismantled some time after the release of the new commercial version of EMTP. Currently the commercial version is controlled by EDF,

and RTE. It is developed and maintained by the team of Jean Mahseredjian inside the PGSTech company. Over the years, several researchers worldwide contributed numerical methods and models for EMT-type simulations tools. The fundamental concept of companion circuit model with trapezoidal integration triggered other major software developments. The EMT-type software named EMTDC/PSCAD is currently developed and maintained by Manitoba HVDC Research Center. The real-time simulation tool named RTDS is commercialized by RTDS Technologies Inc.

also developed a real-time EMT solver named Hypersim. Hypersim is currently commercialized by Opal-RT Technologies Inc. PowerFactory – DIgSILENT has a full EMT-type simulation module.

MathWorks The MathWorks, Inc. is an American privately held corporation that specializes in mathematical computing software. Its major products include MATLAB and Simulink, which support data analysis and simulation. History MATLAB was created in the 1 ...

commercializes a toolbox named Simscape Electrical which is based on the state-space approach for solving electrical circuits and benefits from the powerful control system simulation environment of

Simulink Simulink is a MATLAB-based graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multidomain dynamical systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries. It offe ...

References

*The EMTP Theory Book, Hermann Dommel *Electrical Transients in Power Systems, Allan Greenwood, John Wiley & Sons, 1991.

External links

EMTP
Electromagnetic simulation software Electric power distribution {{simulation-software-stub

See also

References

External links