Design and Implementation of Real Time Electrical Substation Monitoring and Data Acquisition System

SEN719 PROJECT SCOPING AND PLANNING
ASSIGNMENT 3 (FINAL PROJECT REPORT)
PROJECT TITLE: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF
REAL TIME ELECTRICAL SUBSTATION MONITORING
AND DATA AQUISITION SYSTEM
PROJECT SUPERVISOR: MR. MAHBUB RABBANI
STUDENT NAME: SAYYED MUSHAYYED ABRAR MAJID
STUDENT ID: 217014858

Abstract:
This project report deals with the complete design and implementation of a data acquisition
system for an Electrical Substation. The data acquisition system gathers real time information
of various electrical components that are connected within an electrical substation. In modern
time scenario electric power is an important and essential part of human life. Every works
depend on it. Therefore, it is very important to continuously monitor the electrical parameters
of a substation to provide power supply to the consumers without any interruption. A
substation includes power generation, transmission and distribution of electrical power. The
distribution of power involves the transformation of electric voltages at different levels: from
high transmission voltage to low distribution voltage. The interconnection of voltages from
different plants may lead to abnormal events and transformer failures in the substation.
Therefore it is becoming very important to automate supervision and control the operation of
an entire substation, and to notify the central relay system in case of any abnormal power
reading or emergencies. The proposed system continuously monitors the status of the
distribution transformer by measuring some electrical parameters: current, voltage and
physical parameters: temperature, vibration. The real time information are uploaded
continuously in a webserver for remote monitoring purpose.
Introduction:
Power system automation is becoming an important ingredient in any electrical power
network in terms of safety and protection. The data acquisition system plays a great role
while talking about automation. It acts as a basic and central component of the system.
Earlier days monitoring of electrical components was limited to manual measurement and
control. With present trends it is now essential to transform the manual measurement and
testing into digitalized and remote monitoring. The digitization is done with the help of
computerized system. With the increasing demand of uninterrupted power supply,
computerized network for data acquisition system aids the system as well as the controller to
obtain and monitor the electrical and physical parameters with higher accuracy and precision
for continuous time period. The power system automation includes supervision, control and
protection of different parts connected to the system network of the substation (Swarup,
Shanti & Uma Mahesh, P. 2006).
It collects the real time information about different physical and electrical parameters of the
network, locally and remotely controlled functions with more advanced electrical system
protection. The heart of automation process lies on locally decision making, data
communications with active control and monitoring. Maintenance is one of the vital schemes
at power system in terms of providing faultless and uninterrupted operation of the system. It
entails a greater amount of resources; both in human and economical for effectiveness. Now-
a-days, decontrol and denationalization of markets responsible for electric goods have
resulted in huge increase of competition in environment. With addition the existing
infrastructure is getting old and exhaustive. Keeping the price down, by increasing the gross
incomes and by improving the reliability causes to rethink and invest in new management
strategies. For the improvement of the cost-effectiveness of the system, a variety of measures

have been taken into consideration. A transformation from preventive maintenance based on
time (TBM) towards a maintenance based on condition (CBM) is taking place. By using
predictive maintenance one can cut down in the effective cost as it requires less maintenance
cost for the components. These permit either to anticipate to abnormal metering or
breakdowns at the distribution network. The importance of remote monitoring and controlling
are well understood by the various electricity boards in the country today. Not only does
remote controlling lead to much power efficiency and better decision systems, it also brings
intangibles like safety to the system. Though there are different automation systems available
in the market that leads to remote monitoring, none of them has become an industry standard.
The main reason behind this is basically due to the limitation of computing power and lack of
customizability to high price and deficiency of local technical support. The substation may
face various emergent faults due to transmission and distribution of power from different
substations. Therefore prevention of the substation from any unwanted phenomenon or faults
is very important. The faults are causes due to over voltage/current, under voltage/current,
overload to the transformer, single phasing, speed variation, vibration and temperature.
Among them the most important parameters are voltage, current, vibration and temperature.
The computerized data acquisition system consists of mainly: sensors and transducers, signal
conditioning unit and recording or display units. Different analog sensors are used for the
collection of real time data. The potential transformer, current transformer and temperature
sensors are used to estimate errors present in the physical parameters. Potential transformer is
for the protection of over voltage. Similarly, current transformer is in uses for over current
and over load protection and the temperature sensors for sensing temperature of transformer
winding. Supervision of the subsystem can be done for various purposes. The most evident is
to obtain the status of the electrical equipment.
Importance of conditional monitoring of electrical substation:
The importance of condition monitoring of an electrical substation arises to step down the
electrical voltage from a high valued network to a low valued network. The condition
monitoring can be used to distribute a regulated power supply among all the power networks.
Electrical substation is operated and managed for an electrical utility. Electrical substations
are owned by commercial industries. The electrical substations convert high voltage to low
and vice versa as per the requirements. Substations for transmission of the voltage values of
35kV, 110kV and 220kV use low voltage controls and distribution gears. Indoor substations
with high voltage of 110-220 kV are usually built in densely populated areas in the large
cities. Electrical substations for distribution and transmission of voltage values of 800kV and
1500kV uses high voltage controls and have much complex conversion equipment. The need
is arising for electrical substation is to maintain the power quality and it affects the operating
conditions of the whole transmission and distribution networks. The substations are important
part of electrical power transmission system, as it is responsible for the generation of
electricity, transmission and distribution of electric power. There are different types of
electrical substations, such as Distribution substations, Transmission substations, Collector
substations, Converter substation, Switching substations, and Mobile substations. and the
voltage level and their applications reflect the importance of an electrical substation. The