In early 2020 the world changed considerably, and students, professors, and the learning/teaching communities were among those most affected. Many learning labs were closed worldwide with no notice, interrupting engineering educations. OPAL-RT has a long history and investment of time and cooperation with the educational community, and we were able to marshal our resources in short order to assist. In Fall 2020, a Virtual Lab pilot program was launched, consisting of OPAL-RT courseware, to help Read More

Michael Grieves first uttered the term ‘digital twin’ in 2003, and since then much ink and many pixels have been spilled over it. We’ll keep it relatively brief. While ‘digital twin’ can mean many things to many people, it has a more restricted set of understandings when we speak in the context of real-time simulation and/or Hardware in the Loop (HiL) testing. To begin to explain this closer-cropped meaning, let’s start by thinking of a Read More

Despite the current global fight against COVID-19, OPAL-RT continues to work hard in serving its customers with the best operational efficiency possible. With the amazing collaboration of our own employees—and thanks to our stellar IT department—we’ve succeeded in requiring less than 48 hours to optimize our own remote work. All of our users—Academic/Research, Industrial—can achieve the same if they’d like, thanks to the combined use of: Virtual Private Network (VPN)Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)Collaborative and web Read More

Café-in-the-Loop Adapted from Christian Dufour at https://coffee.christiandufour.ca/2020/01/cafe-in-loop.html Ph.D. and Senior Simulation Specialist, Power Systems and Motor Drives, OPAL-RT TECHNOLOGIES This personal project has as its goal the improvement of my morning espresso made with my small yet very faithful 16-year-old Saeco Aroma espresso machine. It is still in a perfectly functional state having required absolutely no repairs, and in this way makes me think of my 2000 Camry. In order to do this, I cabled Read More

The Status Quo 21st century power grids face a number of make-or-break challenges on the Infrastructure/Security/Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection and Control fronts, notably mixed and hybrid old/new analog/digital equipment; newer energy sources like wind and solar integrated into older networks; as well as faster-switching converters and newer digital equipment that make the grid ‘smarter’, more sustainable, future-proofed and flexible—but that also leave it open to all the vulnerabilities associated with networked resources and communications. Smart Grids & Read More