Practical aspects of testing Phasor Data Concentrators for wide area monitoring systems

K Phasor Data Concentrator or Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) is the key building block of the Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) architecture. This paper presents practical aspects of functional testing of a PDC based on industrial experience on product design and testing. The specific contributions presented in this paper are listed below: i) test setup to ensure that all requirements that guided the PDC's design and development are met; ii) key aspects to examine during validation of different PDC functions (i.e. acceptable data rates and formats, time alignment, wait time etc.); iii) validation of the synchrophasor communication protocols implemented on PDC (i.e. IEEE 37.118 and IEC 61850-90-5); iv) time synchronization (with UTC - Coordinated Universal Time or local time zone); v) Device diagnosis functions (i.e. event recorder/SOE - Sequence Of Events, remote device status etc.); vi) performance and stress testing; and vii) Negative testing concepts.