Abstract
Steady-state and dynamic performances of phasor measurement units (PMUs) are critically important to ensure reliable and secure operation of the synchrophasor based wide area monitoring, protection, and control (WAMPaC) systems. Therefore, it is essential to assess PMU performances in the different stages of PMU life cycle; from research and development (R&D) to their operation in power system with diverse WAMPaC applications. The current IEEE synchrophasor standard C37.118.1-2011 [1] with its amendment C37.118.1a-2014 [2] and the IEEE synchrophasor measurement test suite specification (TSS) [3] provide necessary guidelines and test procedures to comprehensively evaluate both steady-state and dynamic performances of PMUs. However, testing of a PMU to meet all steady-state and dynamic performances is a challenging task as PMU test procedures involve hundreds of measurements and calculations.
This paper presents an automated PMU test setup implemented in the real time digital simulator (RTDSTM). The interface software to the RTDS simulator, RSCAD comprises with a tool named PMU Utility, which executes a series of tests, collects measurements, calculates errors, and checks conformity (pass/fail assessment) as per the synchrophasor standard [1], [2] and the TSS [3] guidelines with minimal user interaction. The proposed test setup was applied to a bench-mark PMU model as well as an actual PMU to access their performances in the automated environment and interesting test results are presented.
D. R. Gurusinghe, D. Ouellette, and R. Kuffel, in Proc. Protection, Automation & Control World Conference (PAC World), Ljubljana Slovenia, June 2016
KEYWORDS: Phasor measurement unit (PMU), PMU testing, synchrophasor standard, total vector error, real time digital simulation