One of the key requirements for designing and planning future power systems is understanding of fast transient processes. They are called “electromagnetic transient processes”. PSCAD is one of the most advanced software packages used for this purpose and it has been recently purchased for undertaking AMPaC Megagrant project research in the field of integration of renewable energy sources into the existing power grid. The complexity of the software required a specialized training, which was realized in December 2021. More details about the training is given below.
PSCAD Training Sessions took place at Skoltech in offline mode in the 10-14-th of December 2021. Faculty, researchers, PhD and Master students – members of AMPaC Megagrant team – went through 4 intensive (3-hour a day) sessions that facilitated the participants to evolve from the newcomers to rather experiences PSCAD users.
The tutorial was delivered by Fedor Ivanov, Technical Director of EnLAB – exclusive vendor of Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) in Russia.
Within 4 days we learned how to implement the following models:
- Voltage source connected to a bus with resistive load via line connected to PQ load via cable.
- Source connected to a load via 6 conductor line. The modeled situation: the first tiple conductors suffer from different short circuit events triggering lone breakers, the events are modeled via multirun.
- Voltage source connected to an induction motor via 110/10 kV transformer.
- Voltage source connected to a load via transformer with controlled winding ratio.
Here are the direct comments from the participants.
Anna Malkova (2nd year Master students):
I have always wanted to learn how to model electric power systems to touch their structure and behaviour under different circumstances. This course was extremely useful for me: firstly, I was able to refresh and strengthen with the help of visual examples my applied knowledge about the electric power industry, and secondly, now I can study processes not only in statics but also in dynamics, which will help me a lot when disclosing the topic of my thesis.
Maria Victoria Gasca (PhD student):
Well, I must say that despite the language barrier, I found the tutorial very practical, since we were developing all together the models in PSCAD, guided by the instructions, along with explanations and details of each component.