Tool for testing of phasor measurement units: PMU performance analyser

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) are one of the key sensor technologies for real-time wide area monitoring to realise the smart power grid vision. Before deploying the PMUs, it is important to test and validate performance of this sensor to ensure high reliability and accuracy under different operating scenarios of the power system. However, PMU testing needs to be made simpler, easier, automated and cost-effective to encourage the PMU vendors and utilities to get their PMUs tested. This has been the driving motivation for the development of a new procedure and tool for testing PMUs in this study. The results and findings of PMU testing and analysis using a newly developed software application named `PMU Performance Analyzer´ (PPA) have been discussed in this study. PPA can work with a real-time digital simulator and a phasor data concentrator to make the PMU testing simple, easy, mostly automated, less time-consuming, highly accurate and cost-effective.