OMICRON

Protection systems play a key role in operating today's electricity power systems reliably and safely. This is relevant for all power system grids; generation, transmission and distribution, industrial, commercial, railway, or marine. To ensure correct operation of this vital power system element testing is required. Typical fault conditions as well as stable operating conditions, switching operations and logic schemes have to be simulated to ensure that the protection system works as specified before it’s put into operation. These tests have to be repeated after a certain amount of time due to the inactive nature of the protection devices during normal operating conditions. Consequently, routine tests make sure that the protection systems stay "in shape" over their life-cycle.

Today's challenges in protection testing are many. Often, all relay generations from electromechanical relays to the latest IEC 61850 compliant IEDs have to be managed within one utility. Ideally, one test set can cover tests for all relay generations. Modern multifunctional protection devices are very complex due to the high number of integrated functions. Furthermore, different vendors of protection systems have different operating philosophies and algorithms resulting in high learning and training investments for each new system that has to be dealt with.

OMICRON's protection testing hardware and software is designed to meet those challenges. Solutions for testing electromechanical relays, static relays, numerical relays, IEC 61850 IEDs, relay panels and distributed protection systems are provided. OMICRON's Protection Testing Library (PTL) helps to manage the complexity and variety of these different generations. Furthermore, the OMICRON PTL is visualizing the specific protection characteristics in vendor-independent software, providing the ready-made test plans within the PTL.