Evaluation of PMU Dynamic Performance in Both Lab Environments and under Field Operating Conditions

Capturing system dynamics is one important feature of phasor measurements. To ensure PMU accurately reflect system dynamic behavior, one must evaluate the dynamic performance of a PMU. PMU dynamic performance evaluation includes three aspects: PMU modeling studies, laboratory testing and field evaluation. This paper briefly reviews the general PMU model structure, and then continues on PMU dynamic performance evaluation from actual field measurements. Reasons for field evaluation include: (1) inappropriate field settings of a PMU would generate unexpected phasor measurements; and (2) many conditions can not be easily produced in a lab environment. PMU field evaluation includes aspects like time synchronization, timing inconsistency due to filtering, frequency calculation issues, parasitic oscillations/processing artifacts, etc. Actual WECC measurement examples will be presented. Dynamic PMU testing in a lab environment is explored with a special focus on PMU filtering characteristics. How the phasor quality would impact derived system dynamic characteristics is addressed in the later part of this paper.