Dissertation: Digitizing and standardizing the electrical systems for smart grid
Mike Mekkanen's dissertation analyzes and evaluates the performance of the IEC 61850 standard within modern electrical systems. IEC 61850 is a relatively new international standard of communications for substations and smart grid.
Utilities have been facing a strong trend during the last years towards new technologies and standard to meet new requirements of higher energy demands at expected shortage of the nonrenewable sources of energy.
– Emerging concept of smart grids sets completely new requirements for the energy systems. Distributed production requires distributed automation, which in turn requires advanced communication solutions, says Mekkanen.
The new IEC 61850 standard within energy system is promising and provides a great impact of substation installation, operation and maintenance. It also increases reliability, availability and flexibility of the electric energy grid that links power generation with power consumption in a dynamic manner.
– In the study I firstly considered the IEC 61850 standard from different aspects, says Mekkanen.
He then conducted an explorative study and analysis of the new standard and the legacy power system. Mekkanen did several practical testing experiments for substation automation system (SAS) based on the IEC 61850 standard.
Several SAS communication bus topologies upon breaker failure protection function were tested. They showed that ring topology provides the higher reliability and less probability of failure result values than other topologies.
Configurations and interoperability testing was done between multi-vendor devises. According to the results, there is a need for vender-natural system configuration tool which would be independent of any commercial manufacturers.
On the basis of Mekkanen’s research, a novel reliability and probability of failure estimation method RaFSA which may facilitate the energy systems design was invented.
– This RaFSA estimation method is suitable for estimating the reliability and probability of failure for various individual device, functions, subsystems and systems, Mekkanen explains.
Public defence
The public examination of M.Sc. Mike Mekkanen’s doctoral dissertation ”On Reliability and Performance Analysis of IEC61850 for Digital SAS” is on Tuesday, 20 October at 12 o’clock at auditorium Kurten (Tervahovi). Professor Matti Lehtonen from the Aalto University will act as an opponent and professor Erkki Antila as a custos.
Further information: Mike Mekkanen, t. 044 514 4460, e-mail: mmekka(at)uwasa.fi
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