Control and Protection System

2005-2006

1) Project Title: Integrated Sensors and Protection
Investigator: Noel Schulz

Objective: This is an extension of the previous adaptive protection efforts at MSU. Research has shown the ability to use adaptive differential protection to protect the notional ship layout. The next level of research activities involves investigating how to integrate sensors and protection equipment into the power system to allow for system monitoring and analysis. Issues that need to be addressed are what types of measurements are needed, the coordination of these measurements and the level of local analysis versus integrating the information at a centralized information node.

These research activities will move beyond steady-state solutions to look at the transients in the shipboard system and how sensors can be used to quickly identify fault conditions, to evaluate the health of equipment including predicting failures, and to provide data for every day increased operational efficiencies.

Working with FSU, we will investigate the role of sensors and protection devices on complicated systems using the RTDS system.

2) Project Title: Microturbine-based DG control using UCA
Investigators: Noel Schulz, David Gao

Objectives: One of the keys in having distributed generation is to effectively control the DG. Besides providing steady-state power to the system, the DG also provides a tool that can be adjusted to help with reconfiguration, transients or other expected changes in the power system. A microturbine-based DG can enhance the dynamic performance and reconfigurability of a shipboard power system. To explore the feasibility and effectiveness of such a DG system, an accurate model in VTB is needed. Such a DG system heavily depends on power electronic converters and their controllers. In this project, we will perform a complete dynamic system investigation for micro-turbine together with PM generator, which requires access to these physical devices. This is important for developing accurate dynamic models. The controllers and the various power electronic converters will be built with UCA models from Virginia Tech. By using the UCA, we can achieve a highly modular control architecture, which can facilitate the later hardware prototyping of the Distributed Generation and control system. Then, we will construct the complete DG system model in VTB and evaluate its application in shipboard power distribution system.

3) Project Title: Real-Time VTB for Protective Relay and Sensor Testing
Investigators: Noel Schulz, David Gao

Objectives: One of the biggest challenges for optimizing the electric ship power system is the integration of the power system with some of its control systems, such as the protection system. To effectively do this, there need to be models for the protection equipment that allow for simulation and modeling where the protection system is directly integrated with the power system and they work together in real-time.

To help with the development of the protection relay models, MSU researchers will work with Real Time VTB. This feature will allow the development of a model of a single piece of equipment where the hardware and model response can be tested. As protection and sensor equipment strategies are developed, we will develop models for the pieces in these strategies and allow for more accurate models to be used in advanced simulations. Once these models are completed a larger system can be tested on the RTDS system.

4) Project Title: Porting Labview based Controller in the Loop Testbed to VTB Real-time
Investigators: Herb Ginn, David Gao

Objectives: During the design of power electronic systems various control strategies need to be evaluated with respect to some performance criteria. This evaluation stage is usually conducted in simulation due to the long periods of time required for hardware prototyping. Unfortunately, the digital controller, which in recent years is often based on a digital signal processor (DSP), is difficult to model accurately in simulation. The designer cannot be certain that the digital controller will perform as indicated in the simulation. Therefore, a controller in the loop prototyping tool has been developed using commercially available hardware and software from National Instruments. It allows the developer to evaluate performance of a DSP based digital controller without the need to complete the entire hardware prototype. The system simulates the behavior of the power electronic converter along with the entire supply and load system that the active compensator is connected to. In order to meet the very demanding real-time computations needed for this application, a PXI-8186RT real-time controller from National Instruments is used. A PXI-6602 high-speed digital input device is used to read the PWM signals, and a PXI-6733 high-speed analog output device is used to output the system quantities that are measured by the controller. The system simulation application for the 8186RT was written using Labview Real-time software.

The objective of this research topic is to port the design over to a VTB Real-time system in order to make it more accessible to other members of the consortium. After porting the design to VTB the types of power electronic converter topologies available in the simulation will be expanded. In the current system only the model of MSUs three-pole IGBT PEBB module is available.

2006-2007

1) Project Title: Reconfiguration of the Power System and Protection System
Investigators: Noel Schulz, Anurag Srivastava, Jimena Bastos

Objectives: This project will work to integrate the tools developed previously for reconfiguration of the power system to evaluate different topologies to identify figures of merit related to reconfiguration and contingency analysis including distributed generation sources and intentional islanding strategies. These tools included distributed and centralized approaches. Additionally a comparison of the tools will provide heuristics on the appropriate timing and applications for particular reconfiguration strategies.

Besides the reconfiguration of the power system, additional work will be done to look at reconfiguration of the control systems, in particular the protection system. Phase II of the adaptive protection algorithm will be developed to allow analysis of the new setting required for protective devices. Additionally we will investigate the possibility of adaptive protection devices that allow the protection devices to reconfigure into different protection strategies depending on the power system configuration.

The third area of work is investigating the control of power electronic converters for protection of the DC System. This work will investigate novel approaches for removing faults from the DC distribution.