Development of a test platform for synchrophasor applications with real-time digital simulator

The rapid advance of synchrophasor technology and the growth of phasor measurement unit (PMU) installations in the recent years have substantially increased the feasibility of deploying practical synchrophasor applications. These novel applications need to be thoroughly evaluated before their actual implementations on real power systems. The most feasible solution is to use real-time power system simulators. Therefore, this paper presents a real-time digital simulator (RTDS) based test platform to implement and to validate various synchrophasor applications range from simple monitoring algorithms to advanced response based wide area monitoring, protection and control systems. The proposed test platform can also be used to validate PMU performances as well as to assess cyber-security issues of synchrophasor networks. The effectiveness of the test platform is demonstrated with a real-time monitoring application.