IEC 61850 and digital substation basics

Having studied this first lecture, students will understand the key differences between conventional and digital substations. They will know where digital information exchange is introduced in stations and substations and what else is different in digital substations, besides digitizing the information exchange, compared to conventional substation.

In this lecture students will get to know the basics of GOOSE and Sampled Values communication models. They will understand what these communications models can be applied for as well as they will know the transmission mechanisms applicable for these models.

This lecture gives an overview of communication models which are used to integrate IEDs in supervisory and control systems (SCADA, gateways). Students will know which mechanisms are established by the standard in regard to transmission of remote measurements and indications, controls and etc.

Having studied this lecture, students will understand the structure of IEC 61850 data model. They will understand the key elements of IEC 61850 data model such as logical device, logical node, data object and data attribute.

In this lecture students will get to know what System Configuration Language (SCL) of IEC 61850 standard is. They will study types of SCL files and their structure. They will understand how these files are used at different stages of digital substation implementation and operation.

These lecture gives students a knowledge on basic elements of Local Area Networks (LAN) in substation. Students will understand how Ethernet switches operate, types of traffic in digital substations, traffic management aspects, redundancy protocols and time synchronization requirements and methods.

In the final lecture students will see the examples of digital substation implementation approaches and possible configurations of LAN topologies, depending on how IEC 61850 is applied in substation.

This demo session with the real stand-alone merging unit provides understanding of how such kind of IEDs are configured to publish Sampled Values streams in digital substations. Demo includes overview of basic parameters to be configured in a merging unit and inspection of the traffic using Wireshark to make sure the data is successfully published to the network.