A synchrophasor system emulator - software approach and real-time simulations

Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) using phasor measurement unit (PMU) demonstrate the great potential in monitoring and analyzing power systems. Synchrophasor applications, such as system monitoring, wide-area controls, linear state estimation, and advanced training simulator, are developed to utilize valuable information from synchronized phasor data. However, there are challenges for both power utilities and application developers in designing, developing, testing and evaluating these applications. One of the main issues is the lack of a real-time simulation platform to emulate the PMU data that may be collected from WAMS. To help address these challenges, this paper proposes a software-based synchrophasor system emulator, ePMU. ePMU emulates synchrophasors by streaming real-time simulation results in standard PMU data format for large power system models. In addition, ePMU emulates actual power system controls by accepting commands from external applications to change network parameters and topologies during real-time simulations. This paper presents this real-time synchrophasors emulator and illustrates its values and benefits.