"Universal" interfaces

RED ELECTRICA DE ESPAÑA (REE) is the Spanish Transmission Network Operator (TNO) and has been working in a solution to automate the testing of control equipment in substations. The main reason is to reduce the testing time and to avoid the mistakes that can be made during a manual process.

A control equipment of a transmission substation may have in average 128 Digital Inputs and 32 Digital Outputs. For any new installation, replacement or maintenance operation it is required to test all these digital signals before commissioning. Considering the number of control devices in a substation, the average time required for two technicians to perform all the tests is between 3 and 5 days.

This is the reason why, together with a partner, they have developed a hardware that is able to perform all the tests automatically and the technician just has to program the tests and get the results from a laptop or a tablet.

Weidmüller contribution to this project has been to develop the required testing interfaces that are connected to the existing interfaces of the control devices and to the new hardware that tests all the signals. These test interfaces have two great advantages:

• All the existing wiring between the control equipment and the primary devices remains exactly as it was (is not affected)

• The interfaces can be used with any of the four vendors of control equipment approved at REE (this is the reason why are named “Universal”)

Another remarkable fact of these “universal” interfaces is the EMC compliance as Weidmüller has been able to meet REE requirements of substations devices.