Real-Time Transmission Line Situational Awareness Using NI Phasor Measurement Unit

Today’s power network is spread over a large geographical area. Transmission line forms major part of it, which is exposed to the environment and inherently affected by environmental weather conditions. Thus, situational awareness of the transmission line is extremely important for protecting and restoring power failure quickly. Situational awareness can be defined as the fault perception, fault type comprehension and projection of possible remedial action for restoring the transmission line from faults. Hence, the situational awareness of transmission line draws the attention of recent researches. Particularly, today’s efficient equipment like national instrument (NI) compact RIO (cRIO), equipped with the faster sampling rate and high performance digital signal-processing capability enables the digital real-time simulation expertly. In this paper, a laboratory transmission line prototype of 110 volts, 200 km has been used on which various types of faults were applied. NI real-time data acquisition system along with LabVIEW has been incorporated for fault perception and comprehension of fault type to predict possible situational awareness to protect the transmission line from faults. Implementation in LabVIEW tool support interactive visual display to enable perceiving and decision making even for amateur users.