Assessing Synchrophasor Estimates of an Event Captured by a Phasor Measurement Unit

Abstract

Synchrophasor estimators are nowadays evaluated with the Total Vector Error (TVE) using the synchrophasor representations of the few benchmark signals. This synchrophasor dependence prevents its application to power signals of real events. A new method to obtain the synchrophasor of real signals is proposed in this paper. A finite impulse response (FIR) filter, designed with the nonic O-spline is proposed to obtain phasor estimates asymptotically close to those of an ideal bandpass filter. The phasor estimation accuracy of one or several Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) can be then assessed using the standard. In addition, it is possible to design two FIR differentiators to obtain frequency and ROCOF estimates close enough to those of ideal differentiator filters, and largely compliant with the standard. This new set of filters opens the way to apply the synchrophasor standard to assess estimates of PMUs of different brands when they process the same signals of a power system event. In this paper, the erratic phasor and frequency estimates produced by a SEL-351 A PMU from a real distributed generation system are assessed to corroborate that the synchrophasor standard can be opened to this new application based on real signals from the field, previously considered as impossible.