A predictive protection scheme based on adaptive synchrophasor communications

This paper presents a conceptual design of a synchrophasor based protection and control scheme that uses an efficient communications scheme to timely predict the voltage instability point of a local bus. A voltage instability prediction scheme is proposed that fits a set of algebraic equations to the measured synchrophasor data and performs some efficient computations to predict when the load profile of the local bus will reach the critical point. To keep the communications load of the scheme minimum, the novel concept of adaptive synchrophasor reporting is introduced that dynamically switches between a normal and an expedited reporting rate based on the output of the prediction algorithm. The performance of the proposed protection scheme is demonstrated by using the New England 39-bus system. Also, the performance of the communications scheme is analyzed through an OPNET simulation model using an IEEE 802.16/WiMAX based wireless communications network.