Development of power system protection laboratory through senior design projects

This paper describes a novel power system laboratory at Birla Vishvakarma Mahavidyalaya (B.V.M.) Engineering College, Gujarat, India, where every experiment was designed, wired and commissioned through senior design projects. The experiments on power system protection are especially unique in terms of their design and implementation and will be highlighted in this paper. They provide a real substation-like operating environment. Through these projects, the students, in addition to getting familiar with the fundamentals of protection, learned how different protection schemes are wired and how they operate in a real power system. For the institute, a quality laboratory was established at a low cost, which is a crucial issue for most colleges in many parts of the world.

I. Introduction

OVER the past two decades, different laboratories focusing on teaching and researching the area of power system protection have been reported [1]–[8]. Sidhu and Sachdev [1], [2] describe a laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan that focuses on designing relay strategies, modeling them and testing them using high speed digital signal processing (DSP) boards and an array of design softwares. Redfern et al. [3] describe testing relays using actual voltage and current data converted from the data files generated by power system simulation software. Lee et al. [4] report a relay performance testing facility using simulated transmission line modules. The paper describes both the hardware and the software strategy and documents the performance results of an instantaneous overcurrent relay and a reverse power relay. Carullo and Nwankpa [5] describe a laboratory that focuses on the data acquisition, energy management and supervisory control aspects of a power system that form the basis of a modern protection system. Kabir [6] documents the performance of a laboratory experiment on a scaled down power system protected by a single computer implementing an over-current protection strategy. Chen et al. [7] report the laboratory implementation of an intelligent embedded microprocessor based overcurrent protection scheme. McLaren et al. [8] report a relay testing facility based on Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS).