Hybrid protection and control system for the petroleum & chemical industry

This paper describes a hybrid protection and control (HPC) secondary substation system for Petroleum and Chemical industry applications. The developed HPC system is based on the partial or entire shift of the bay level functions from the bay level to the substation level via a highly-available and fast Ethernet network based on the IEC 61850 standard. The HPC architecture integrates centralized protection and control units, performing backup and high-complexity functions, to the existing substation secondary system, in which performs the basic protection and control functions at process level, via a redundant Ethernet network. In combination, this results in a functionality-redundant system. This approach is developed to improve system reliability, flexibility and availability and to enable centralized-based protection and control functionality. The approach can be well implemented in both greenfield and brownfield projects. In order to demonstrate this concept, this paper describes: (i) the hybrid protection and control concept and its benefits; (ii) the main technologies; and (iii) the benefits to the Petroleum and Chemical industry. The main results show that the HPC system aggregates benefits from both centralized and decentralized architectures with moderate changes in the secondary system. In addition, the hybrid approach offers benefits from dividing protection and control functions into the station and bay levels, according to their criticality and complexity, and includes state-ofthe- art substation communication features.