OpenPMU, PTP, and Time Synchronized Sampled Values
Date: Wed., Dec 13th, 2023, 04:30 PM – 06:00 PM (MST) Alberta
Location: Virtual
Sponsor: IEEE Southern Alberta, Jt. Control System/Industrial Measurement Chapter, CS23/IM09
Speaker: Prof. David Laverty of Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Topic: OpenPMU, PTP, and Time Synchronized Sampled Values
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.”
— Lord Kelvin.
Synchronized measurement technology, more specifically the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU), has yielded tremendous insight into power system phenomena over the last decades. The PMU, however, is an instrument that is not itself well understood by many who make use of its measurements. The time synchronized phasor, or synchrophasor, is a double-edged sword; on the one hand it has made it possible to apply classical methods of power system analysis to “real” data from real systems. On the other hand, the synchrophasor dispenses with all the nuance of the voltage or current waveform that was present in the sampled values from which it is estimated.
What if we just keep all of the time synchronized sampled value (TSSV) data, and use that for our studies? Building machines which can do this is more than feasible. This talk will discuss approaches and challenges that engineers pursuing this strategy face, in particular the not so small matter of the many terabytes of data such a system will create, with “needle in a haystack” levels of useful information. The talk will describe an effort on the island of Ireland to build a national system to record TSSV and also synchronize using PTP in preference to GNSS and its “space-based” vulnerabilities.