A Synchrophasor Test Platform for Development and Assessment of Phasor Measurement Units

Abstract

The development of platforms and methods for test and calibration of phasor measurement units (PMUs) has drawn attention from the power systems community, especially due to the wide range of specific tests that must be performed. Aiming at reducing labor-intensive processes and the complexity of such tests, this paper presents an automated platform for test, calibration, and performance assessment of PMUs following the IEEE Std C37.118.1. The platform is composed of signal-generation hardware and software running on a personal computer. The test signals are synthesized in software, allowing different waveform configurations for automated testing. Also, the software receives information from the PMU under test and compares it to reference data, displaying results and statistics in real time. Because most of the functions of the system are performed in software, easy inclusion of additional tests or migration to other signal-generation hardware platforms is possible. The resulting test system allows tracing the behavior of the hardware and corresponding embedded software used in the PMU architecture under test through thousands of measurements collected in just a few minutes. The simple and versatile low-cost system presented in this paper enables accurate, flexible, and versatile automated testing of PMU devices with real-time visualization of results.