Case study of designing a fault recorder system

Fault recorders are reckoned among the most important components of protection systems within high voltage substations which through continuous monitoring the power system parameters and diagnosing fault situations as well as recording the parameters status before and after the occurrence of a faults, assisting substation engineers to identifying the cause of the failures and eliminating them. Designing the fault recorders using innovative and breakthrough hardware and software components such as high-speed processors, high capacity mass storages, accurate analog to digital converters, real time operating systems etc, enables them to collect a huge amount of precise information from the status of power network. This information can subsequently be used by evaluating software to analysis the circumstances of the fault to avoid repeating it in the future. In this paper the designing a fault recorder system is discussed as a case study for designing an embedded system, considering its specific requirements and exceptions.