Bi-annual Newsletters Vol. 3 | Page 4

research highlights Hardware Testbed The control and visualization room has been built in the HTB to mimic a real control center in the industry. Phasor measurement units (PMUs), frequency disturbance recorders (FDRs), potential transformers (PTs), and current transformers (CTs) are installed at various buses to monitor the power flow, voltage amplitude and angle independently. Signals from the above devices are directly or indirectly delivered to the computer through Ethernet. Then, the measurement data will be updated and displayed on the visualization wall every 0.1 s. Hardware Testbed Communication Structure The control center utilizes the LabVIEW platform. It is capable of sending supervisory control commands, such as power dispatch, wind speed, and irradiance level to the emulators. Generation references calculated by AGC are sent to the generator emulators in the HTB through CAN bus. In addition to the traditional method, AGC can be also realized through state estimation or other improved methods in LabVIEW. Hardware Testbed Control Panel & Measurement Display In addition to the construction of the control center, ongoing work has been carried out for developing new emulators. Flywheel energy storage emulator has been tested in the HTB with different scenarios; transmission line emulator with a back-to-back structure is now installed in the HTB and under test; preliminary experiments on RTDS hardware-in-the-loop simulation has been performed. Furthermore, the 3rd cabinet has been built and tested in the HTB. Based on the above efforts, the HTB is now aiming at expanding to a 3 or 4 area system, and involving testing scenarios with more renewable energy sources, HVDC and many other advanced technologies. 3