HARDWARE-IN-THE-LOOP TESTING OF ELECTRICAL PROTECTION AND CONTROL SYSTEMS

Tying a large greenfield plant to an existing and fully operational brownfield facility requires complex planning and modeling. Protection, load shedding, turbine load sharing, synchronization, and other key functionalities must be tested during all phases of the cutover sequence to successfully merge the greenfield and brownfield systems. To validate the effectiveness of these functionalities, a real-time, hardware-in-the-loop, digital simulation can be applied using actual control systems. This paper describes the design, technology, model development, and overall validation of such a hardware-in-the-loop simulation at the largest oil and gas project in the world. This project includes a 1 GW power system distributed over a large geographic region that must run in an islanded configuration when not connected to the local utility of equivalent size. Lessons learned and results from recent hardware-in-the-loop testing are shared.