Design and Development of Communication Adapter for Legacy Substation Devices

The work was carried to integrate the legacy substation devices with the modern substation system. Since the new standardization recently introduced requites all existing substation devices to be replaced with the new ones. But for the developing countries, it is not feasible to completely replace the substation devices all at once due to involvement of huge investments. As a result, the power system operation cannot be improved due to non-availability of information regarding the status, history, fault report, etc. of such legacy substation devices. A communication adapter needed to integrate the substation legacy devices i.e. without communication capability, with the modern utility information retrieval systems. This paper will present the design and development of low cost optimal communication adapter which will be based on both hardware and software implementation. It will serve a lot keeping in view the new open energy market demands, low cost, interoperability, and computational speed, permitting sharing of data and computing resources across power system. The results of processing and related reports are concisely displayed on the user interface screen and exported through data files.