Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Wind of Change is blowing in Wind Power Protection using IEC 61850-9-2

When the IEC Technical Committee 88 (Wind Turbines) started the IEC 61850-based project IEC 61400-25 "Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants" in 2001 only a few experts expected that IEC 61850 would have a crucial impact on the way how wind parks will be equipped with intelligent devices. Most experts believed that the main use of standard information models and information exchange is for control and monitoring purposes only.

A very interesting paper has been written recently that discusses the use of IEC 61850-9-2 "Sampled values over ISO/IEC 8802-3" for protection functions in a whole park. Each Turbine/Tower provides current and voltage samples and other information in a continuous stream of sampled value messages. The IEC 61850-9-2 sampled values are distributed as Ethertype multicast messages (from a publishing device, often called Merging Unit) - and received by many subscribing devices. This allows to distribute and collect the measurements for protection and other use cases (e.g., 80 samples per nominal period - 20 ms in a 50 Hz system). Protection could now be implemented in a centralized location, and a few central protection devices could protect many distributed equipments (generator, transformer, circuit breakers, ...).

Implementation of Merging Units may also be used in the near future to distribute non-electric measurements like vibration measurements from gear boxes and blades.

Click HERE for the very interesting paper.

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