Abstract
Substations are becoming increasingly reliant on international electrotechnical commission (IEC)-61850-enabled devices. However, device compatibility with these standards does not guarantee interoperability when devices are taken from different manufacturers. If interoperability of multivendor devices can be achieved, then power utilities will be in a position to implement multivendor devices in substations. The study here presents the development and testing of a digital substation test platform that incorporates devices from different manufacturers. The process bus communication and protection operation of the intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) were tested to validate device interoperability. The testbed was tested for two IED process bus communications, generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE) and sampled measured value (SMV). The GOOSE is travelling between IED to IED with an end-to-end (ETE) delay of 2 ms and the SMV read by the IEDs are the same as the injected real-time substation inputs 220 kV and 1 kA. Three IED protection studies (overcurrent, earth fault, and overvoltage) were performed, and IED response curves were obtained. In addition, data monitoring and client–server communications were studied using installed software tools. The testbed configuration in this study has faced some real-time challenges regarding differences in device edition, device firmware, and ethernet switch due to its multivendor approach. All the mentioned configuration issues were resolved in this study with successful testing and validation of the testbed. The study of this testbed will provide solutions to the problems associated with a multivendor system faced by substation engineers and will help them in opting for multivendor installations. This system can be extended in the future by installing more multivendor devices with complex network topology and a SCADA system.
Highlights
Modern power system networks are capable of better serving their customers with efficient communication networks, faster protection schemes, and future expansions as they have high-performance intelligent electronic devices (IEDs)
The goal of this study is to provide the basic idea of a digital substation with multivendor devices and to encourage substation engineers so that they can opt for multivendor installations in their substations, which will make the system reinstallation cheaper and faster
In the proposed single-bay digital substation, international electrotechnical commission (IEC) 61850 standards were implemented to facilitate the interoperability of substation devices that are taken from different vendors
Summary
Modern power system networks are capable of better serving their customers with efficient communication networks, faster protection schemes, and future expansions as they have high-performance IEDs. Substation interoperability testing is generally performed by individual manufacturers of their products In this scenario, the coordination of device operations and data security will not be a problem. A literature study of the above papers on IEC 61850 substations shows that most of the authors attempted to design IEC-based substations using various simulation platforms or single vendor devices. They tested their models to establish the interoperability of devices, process bus communications: GOOSE, SMV, and protection operations. The laboratory testbed proposed in this study has a new approach of using multivendor devices in its architecture so that a digital substation installation and future maintenance can become cost-effective and faster.
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