An experimental setup for testing synchrophasor-based Damping control systems

Prototype Wide-Area Power system Oscillation Damping (WAPOD) controllers using synchrophasor data have been proposed, developed and tested in field demonstration projects. However, the development and testing process of these control systems has been confined to a few specific cases, the details of which have not been thoroughly reported in available literature. This paper details the development, construction and implementation of a real-time, Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test set-up for such a control system. A general purpose, phasorbased control algorithm is deployed on a Compact Reconfigurable Input/Output (cRIO) controller from National Instruments. The complete, closed-loop experimental set-up, the hardware used and the rationale behind different design choices are also documented. As this test-set-up uses IEEE C37.118 data over a TCP/IP network, the complete, real-time data path is examined. A realtime HIL test with the implemented controller is also presented and results are analysed.