A Phasor Measurement Unit Algorithm Using IIR Filters for FPGA Implementation

Abstract

Phasor measurement units (PMU) are increasingly used in electrical power transmission networks, to maintain stability and protect the network. PMUs accurately measure voltage, phase, frequency, and rate of change of frequency (ROCOF). For reliability, it is desirable to implement a PMU using an FPGA. This paper describes a novel algorithm, suited to implementation in an FPGA and based on a simple PMU block diagram. A description of its realization using low hardware complexity infinite impulse response (IIR) filters is given. The IEC/IEEE standard 60255-118-1:2018 Part 118-1: Synchrophasor measurements for power systems, describes “reference” Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters for implementing PMU hardware. At the 10 kHz sampling frequency used for our implementation, each “reference” FIR filter requires 100 multipliers, while an 8th order IIR filter only requires 12 multipliers. This paper compares the performance of different order IIR filter-based PMUs with the performance of the same PMU algorithm using the IEC/IEEE FIR reference filter. The IIR-based PMU easily satisfies all the requirements of IEC/IEEE standard and has a much better out of band signal rejection performance than a FIR-based PMU. Steady state errors for a rated voltage ± 10% and a rated frequency ± 5 Hz are < 0.000001% for total vector error (TVE) and < 1 µHz for frequency, with a latency of two mains cycles.