A Distributed Recording System Based on IEC 61850 Process Bus

IEC 61850 is the new standard for communications in substations that defines process bus and substation bus communications allowing the development of distributed waveform recording systems. The paper describes the different components of such systems and the distribution of functions between the devices included in it. Multiple merging units communicate over a 100 Mb Ethernet with a central computer that receives and records current and voltage waveforms with a sampling rate of 256 samples/cycle. The samples from the different merging units are then saved as a combined single COMTRADE file. The architecture of the system, triggering criteria, system performance and analysis tools are described in the paper