Centralized Disturbance Detection in Smart Microgrids With Noisy and Intermittent Synchrophasor Data

Microgrids are prone to network-wide disturbances such as voltage and frequency deviations. Detection of disturbances by a microgrid central controller (MGCC) is therefore necessary for improving the network operation. Motivated by this application, this paper presents a new structure for the centralized detection of disturbances with noisy synchrophasor data and packet delay/dropouts. We build the proposed structure starting from the analysis of noise-delay tradeoff in synchrophasor networks, and developing a new phasor data concentrator (PDC) for compensation of data losses. The statistical performance metrics of the disturbance detector are numerically evaluated in the case of islanding detection, corroborating that the centralized detector counteracts the measurement noise and lowers the detection time. Numerical results show that the proposed structure significantly mitigates the probability of false detection. Moreover, it can achieve the lower bound of average detection time in a wide range of packet drop rates. This study is useful to network designers who need to employ data acquisition systems for reliable and robust microgrid control applications.