Electrical Substations Automation - Modelling and Simulation

 

 

 

Introduction:

 

"Over the past years the paradigm for power-substations-control evolved and became distributed, using (...) modular automatisms, outdating the centralized hardwired substation-automation-systems" [Parreira11].

 

"IEC 61131-3 programmable logic controller languages (...) do not provide many advanced features as offered by advanced programming environments and languages" [Yang09].

 

The concurrency of intelligent electronic devices, that sense and control energy distribution, are challenging in the automation of electric substations that form the very complex, intricate, Power Grid we live in these days. Simulation and Mathematical tools are instrumental to keep designing effectively such important devices.

 

 

Objectives:

 

The main objective of this work is simulating a Substation and a Substation-Automation-System in a way that allows assessing the positive impact of automation on Power Quality.

 

 

Detailed description:

 

Nowadays electrical substations are based on Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), which are hardwired to the circuit breakers, current transformers, and voltage transformers, and perform protection and control functions, as well as, event and oscillographic recording [Parreira11]. In addition, substations form complex networks known generically as the Power Grid. Keeping high standards of Power Quality imply effectively programming and introducing control methodologies in the widely distributed substations and the associated IEDs. Standard programming tools (IEC 61131-3) do not offer the full advantages of advanced programming and modelling tools.

 

IST has pioneered work, more than two decades ago, on substation automation using Petri Nets as a fundamental mathematical tool [PintoSa90]. Petri Nets offer the distinct advantage of allowing proving correctness of system behaviours. In this MSc thesis proposal, the central objective is revisiting some of the original system models and control methodologies, creating system simulators and combining them with recent Petri Net design tools [Parreira11]. In the end, is desired to obtain an estimate of the performance of the simulated automated system. The estimated performance of the system will enable future works on optimizing the automation of substations.

 

The work is therefore organized in the following main steps:

- [Review] Components of an electrical substation

- [Review] Faults and protection equipment

- [Implementation] Simulating faults on an electrical substation

- [Implementation] Testing automatic control functions using Petri Nets

- [Implementation] Evaluating the performance of the automated solution

 

 

References:

 

[PintoSa90] "Design and Verification of Concurrent Switching Sequences with Petri Nets", J.L. Pinto de e J.P.S. Paiva, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 5, No.4, October 1990.

 

[Parreira11] "Standardized Implementation of Substation Automatic Control Functions Designed with Petri Nets", MSc thesis, by Rui Parreira, supervised by Professor José Pinto de , IST 2011.

 

[Yang09] "Programmable Logic for IEC 61850 Logical Nodes by means of IEC 61499", C. Yang, V. vyatkin, N. Nair, J. Chouinard, IEEE Int. Conf. of Industrial Electronics Society, 2011.

 

 

Requirements (grades, required courses, etc):

-

 

Expected results:

 

At the end of the work, the students will have enriched their experience in modelling electric substations and controlling their faults.