A theoretical and practical approach for underexcitation protection and control studies of hydrogenerators in a real-time environment.

Abstract

–The installation and settings of protection devices and excitation control systems require experience since a failure can cause damage to the synchronous generator and negative impact on the power grid. A test bed implemented in a real-time digital simulator is presented in this paper as an alternative for the training and learning process that involves the knowledge of an effective coordination between such protection and control systems of synchronous generators. A complete generation system is implemented in a real-time digital simulator, including an excitation system model with its limiters. These limiters are coordinated with the protection functions implemented in a physical relay. The contributions of this work are: the demonstration of the importance of this type of study (i.e., real time simulations results through hardware-in-the-loop tests); the consolidation of the impedance (R-X) and admittance (G-B) planes as the more appropriate ones to analyze the coordination between the ANSI 40 function and the underexcitation limiter; and the presentation of a study focused on hydrogenerators (including novel settings for the ANSI 40 protection).