Emulating Synchrophasor Frequency Measurements With Transient Stability Simulation

In transient stability simulators such as PSS/E, the bus frequency is estimated using a window of (positive-sequence) phasor angle measurements. A digital filter is often used to account for the filtering effect in actual measurement devices and to eliminate sudden changes during frequency computations. Although transient stability simulators label the filtered angle derivative as the “frequency,” the frequency provided by such programs does not match actual measurements reported by phasor measurement units (PMUs), which makes it difficult to gauge the validity of studies (e.g., wide-area event detection and control applications) that are based on such simulations. In this paper, we implement a frequency computation method directly using positive phasor angles provided by simulators. The proposed method is tested on two systems extensively and validated against the measurements of an actual PMU. The improved frequency measurements closely match PMU responses. Cross-validation results also suggest the method may be used for other systems without conducting full time-domain simulations.