IEC-61850 gateway

Gateways play an important role in Substation Automation Systems (SAS).

Gate­ways are hard­ened com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices which col­lect meter­ing, sta­tus, events and fault report data from any pro­tec­tion device inside sub­sta­tion. The gate­way sends this infor­ma­tion upstream to a Con­trol cen­ter, and trans­fers com­mands issued from the con­trol cen­ter to devices inside the substation.

In IEC-61850 based sub­sta­tions the gate­way has become an impor­tant part of the SAS (Sub­sta­tion Automa­tion Sys­tem), because is a cen­tral piece that trans­lates all this data from both sides, between IEC-61850 devices to the Con­trol Cen­ter, usu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with DNP3 or IEC-60870–5‑101/104.

 

All these stan­dards are dif­fer­ent in many aspects: mes­sage for­mat, report method, objects struc­ture, data types and mean­ings. There­fore, it’s not only a mat­ter of trans­fer­ring dig­i­tal and ana­log val­ues with an appro­pri­ate data type, but deal with time­stamps, qual­i­ty bits, report­ing meth­ods, ini­tial­iza­tion, com­mand exe­cu­tion and time synchronization.

More­over, some sub­sta­tions need to be con­nect­ed to more than one con­trol cen­ter, and each con­trol cen­ter may com­mu­ni­cate with dif­fer­ent pro­to­cols and dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tions media. This is a typ­i­cal case of High Volt­age sub­sta­tions con­nect­ed to the Dis­tri­b­u­tion grid as well as to the Trans­mis­sion grid.

All our gate­ways meet these require­ments, start­ing with basic mod­els such us iGW-B0.

Sub­sta­tion 61850 gate­ways con­nect to all Intel­li­gent Elec­tron­ic Devices (IEDs) usu­al­ly through an Eth­er­net net­work. Typ­i­cal­ly this net­work is redun­dant using Rapid Span­ning Tree Pro­to­col (RSTP) our iGW-S3 gate­way is a good option for these sce­nar­ios. For sub­sta­tions with high­er redun­dan­cy require­ments our iGW-S0 gate­way sup­ports seam­less­ly redun­dan­cy pro­to­cols such us PRP and HSR.

When device redun­dan­cy is required, all our gate­ways can run on a stand-by redun­dan­cy scheme, where the stand-by gate­way is always up-to-date and is able, at any time, to replace the active gate­way when some­thing fails.

Some­times, a gate­way is a piece of soft­ware embed­ded inside the sub­sta­tion router. Our iGW-VM soft­ware sup­ports all the same gate­way fea­tures while allow­ing to take advan­tage of already exist­ing hardware.

Our iGW gate­ways are avail­able with sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion port con­fig­u­ra­tions which makes them suit­able for any tele­con­trol system.

 

IEC61850 Gateways for substations

 Are you inter­est­ed on an IEC61850 gate­way for your sub­sta­tions? Using IEC 61850 opens a wide range of options on the sub­sta­tion automa­tion process, improv­ing the con­trol and the man­age­ment of any exist­ing facil­i­ty, thanks to its advanced tools and its ven­dor inter­op­er­abil­i­ty. iGrid T&D strong­ly believes in IEC61850 as the best sub­sta­tion automa­tion option for our cus­tomers. Fur­ther­more, for sub­sta­tion upgrade or refur­bish­ment projects, the iGW gate­ways become a key part of the project.

One of the IEC 61850 key fea­tures is the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between ven­dors, elim­i­nat­ing the need for pri­vate or lega­cy pro­to­cols, and mak­ing pos­si­ble to use mul­ti­ple ven­dor prod­ucts for the same func­tion, with­out wor­ry­ing on the com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Our iCon­trol IEC 61850 SCADA takes advan­tage of this fact and eas­i­ly import any SCL file and auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­fig­ure the data collection.

While the iGW, IEC61850 gate­way, deliv­ers a CID/ICD file where all the sig­nals col­lect­ed using any oth­er pro­to­col are mapped to the IEC 61850 log­i­cal nodes (LN)

 

iGW : the best IEC 61850 gateway option

 Why use the iGrid T&D solu­tions? Because our devices are being installed in HV and MV sub­sta­tions, as well as in gen­er­a­tion plants, all over the world, from Chile to Indone­sia, using all the stan­dard pro­to­cols on the util­i­ties mar­ket, like IEC 60870–5‑104 or DNP3.0, but with a spe­cial focus on the IEC61850 gate­way, where our solu­tions can act as MMS client or serv­er, as well as, GOOSE pub­lish­er or subscriber.

RTUs, gate­ways and SCADA sys­tems for the elec­tri­cal mar­ket are at the core of our com­pa­ny knowl­edge, so let us know your prob­lem and we will give you the best solution