A Reconfigurable Hardware Prototype for Pre-compliance Testing of Phasor Measurement Units

Pre-compliance tests are intended to be used to assess Phasor Measurement Unit(PMU)s' performance during their design and implementation before sending them for certification or using them for grid dynamic measurements. Methodologies for pre-compliance testing of PMUs based on the dynamic requirements of the IEEE C37.118.1-2014 standard are discussed and reported in recent literature. However, these tests are mostly performed through software simulations and there are limited test-hardwares available. To address this issue, a simple reconfigurable hardware prototype is proposed in this paper. The implementation is carried out using National Instruments' Compact RIO family of reconfigurable hardware and it provides a fast, time-synchronous and efficient way to perform all the compliance tests on the PMU under investigation.