Opal-RT Technologies Sets the Industry Standard for Electric Drive Simulation with RT-LAB Electric Drive Simulator

Company delivers the World's Fastest, Most Precise Real-time Electrical System Simulator to Mitsubishi, Toyota and Hitachi

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 21 -- Opal-RT Technologies Inc. (http://www.opal-rt.com/ ), the world leader in distributed simulation on PC- based platforms, today announced that the RT-LAB(TM) Electric Drive Simulator, installed in August at Mitsubishi Electric Company in Japan, has set the performance standard as the world's fastest and most precise real-time simulator of electrical systems.

The RT-LAB(TM) Electric Drive Simulator is an integrated software and hardware solution for engineers designing electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Based on Opal-RT's flagship RT-LAB technology and utilizing PC- based software and hardware components, the RT-LAB Electric Drive Simulator provides a hard-real-time platform for the simulation of all mechanical, electrical, and control system aspects of vehicle behavior. The RT-LAB platform allows design engineers to accelerate the design process through virtual-prototyping with high-fidelity simulation using dynamic models, particularly for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, thereby reducing prototype construction and testing costs.

Using Simulink(TM) software, the real-time electrical simulator can simulate a complete AC motor drive with a sampling time below 10 microseconds, with an effective precision better than 1 microsecond, due to the use of the fastest Pentium(R) 4 Xeon(TM) dual-processor shared memory boards, a unique real-time interpolation algorithm and fast Xilinx FPGA reconfigurable I/Os. Electrical drive systems with PWM carrier frequencies as high as 10 kHz, used for machine tools and hybrid electrical vehicle applications, can now be simulated accurately enabling the design and testing of advanced control systems, by connecting the controller in closed loop with the simulator, saving the time to build costly prototypes.

In addition, several processor boards can be interconnected, through the use of fast and ultra-low latency serial communication systems, to simulate complex distributed power generation and distribution systems found in large off-highway trucks, military vehicles, trains, ships, wind turbine farms and industrial systems, using high-power multi-power converters connected or not to the power grid.

The fastest electric drive simulator started to operate last month at Mitsubishi in Japan for the real-time simulation of AC motor drive, including a permanent synchronous motor, an IGBT inverter, an internal PWM controller used for testing and several I/O channels, analog, and digital both static and time-stamped with a 10 nanosecond resolution.

"To ensure that the development of electric and hybrid electric vehicles continues to gain momentum, design engineers must be able to use high-fidelity virtual prototypes to eliminate problems in the early stages of the design process," said Jean Belanger, Opal-RT Technologies' President & CEO. "The RT- LAB Electric Drive Simulator continues to set the standard for electrical system design simulation, allowing design engineers to conduct HIL testing of dynamic models of electric drives, while easily merging these models with a virtual prototype of the entire vehicle. The end result is a dramatic reduction in the duration and cost of the real prototyping stage and of the overall design process.

As well as Mitsubishi Electric, this powerful, scalable and affordable distributed real-time simulation technology is now being used by Toyota and Hitachi in Japan, and General Electric in the US, China and India.

About Opal-RT Technologies Inc.

Opal-RT provides software, hardware, and related solutions for real-time simulation applications, with the aim of enabling real-time parallel processing through flexible and affordable technologies.

The company offers a full range of engineering simulation products -- from enabling technologies to turnkey engineering simulators -- and consulting services that include systems integration, software development, simulation and modeling, problem-solving, and training. Opal-RT's core expertise is in distributed hard-real-time simulation, with experienced engineers designing real-time simulators for automotive, electrical power, aerospace, robotics, and other industries where fidelity and fault tolerance requirements push rapid prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop testing to their limits. Opal-RT's unique approach integrates parallel, distributed computing with commercial- off-the-shelf technologies. The resulting RT-LAB product range enables customers to develop simulations quickly, easily, affordably, and competitively. For more information about Opal-RT's range of Engineering Simulators and Distributed Processing Tools, see http://www.opal-rt.com/ .

About RT-LAB

RT-LAB is the real-time technology that revolutionizes the way model-based design is performed within the engineering organization. Through its openness, RT-LAB has the flexibility to be applied to any simulation and control problem, and scalability to provide a low-risk entry point for any application, allowing the developer to add computation power where and when needed -- whether to dramatically speed up simulations or for real-time hardware-in-the-loop applications.

  RT-LAB is a registered trademark of Opal-RT Technologies Inc.
  Simulink is a registered trademark of The Mathworks Inc.
  Pentium and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation

  Related News:

Opal-RT Technologies Unveils RT-LAB Electric Drive Simulator - November 16, 2003

http://www.opal-rt.com/news/press/20031112/20031112.html

NOTE TO EDITORS: Electric Drive Transportation Association Conference & Exposition 2004, Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center - Orlando, Booth # 504