On-line Calibration of Instrument Transformers Using Synchrophasor Measurements

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Date
2017-10-27
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Virginia Tech
Abstract

The world of power systems is ever changing; ever evolving. One such evolution was the advent of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). With the introduction of PMUs in the field, power system monitoring and control changed for the better. Innovative and efficient algorithms that used synchrophasors came to be written. To make these algorithms robust, it became necessary to remove errors that crept into the power system with time and usage. Thus the process of calibration became essential when practical decisions started being made based on PMU measurements.

In the context of this thesis ‘calibration’ is the method used to estimate a correction factor which, when multiplied with the respective measurement, negates the effect of any errors that might have crept into them due to the instrument transformers located at the inputs of a PMU or the PMU device itself. Though this thesis mainly deals with the calibration of instrument transformers, work has been done previously for calibrating other components of a power system. A brief description of those methods have been provided along with a history on instrument transformer calibration.

Three new methodologies for instrument transformer calibration have been discussed in details in this thesis. The first method describes how only voltage transformers can be calibrated by placing optimal number of good quality voltage measurements at strategic locations in the grid, in presence of ratio errors in the instrument transformers and Gaussian errors in the PMUs. The second method provides a way to calibrate all instrument transformers (both current and voltage) in presence of only one good quality voltage measurement located at the end of a tie-line. This method assumes that all the instrument transformers have ratio errors and the PMUs have quantization errors. The third method attains the same objective as the second one, with the additional constraint that the data obtained from the field may be contaminated. Thus, the third method shows how calibration of all the instrument transformers can be done with data that is intermittent and is therefore, the most practical approach (of the three) for instrument transformer calibration.

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Keywords
Calibration, Current transformers (CTs), Optimal placement, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), Quantized errors, Voltage Transformers (VTs)
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