Integration of PSCAD based power system & IEC 61850 IEDs to test fully digital protection schemes

The deployment of IEC 61850-8-1 GOOSE & IEC 61850-9-2 process bus technologies facilitate the implementation of fully digital protection applications in modern substations. However, in order to test the behavior of such fully digital protection schemes for real power system, it is required to replicate the huge power system infrastructure and its dynamic conditions in a laboratory. This paper is an effort to solve the above issue and integrates PSCAD based power system and IEC 61850 IEDs. Instead of making IEDs as part of the power system, approach of this paper is to simulate the faults for a power system, using PSCAD, and then feed these fault waveforms to the protection IEDs in order to test and verify their behavior. Further, PSCAD generated data of fault waveforms is analog and converted to digital format for implementing and testing fully digital distance protection scheme using IEC 61850-8-1 GOOSE & IEC 61850-9-2 process bus technologies.