Development and evaluation of a laboratory based phasor measurement devices

In this paper, the development of a laboratory based phasor measurement unit (PMU) is presented. The developed PMU complies with the technical requirements of C37.118 synchrophasor standard and provides large number of time-synchronized measurements for a variety of laboratory based smart grid experiments. The prototype implementation was tested, evaluated and compared with commercial PMUs available at the smart grid test bed at Florida International University. The actual GPS antenna and receiver were used to provide standard timing (IRIG-B) signal. Through the developed embedded IRIG-B decoder, the trigger instance was retrieved. The deployed time information was used to trigger data acquisitions and consequently, to time-stamp the measurements such as frequency and voltage phasors. Finally, the collected information messages were reported to the phasor data concentrator (PDC) using synchrophasor protocol and compared with commercial PMUs. The results compare accurately and provide the user to implement a variety of test cases and training data to teach the many uses of PMUs.