The Siemens Digital Twin enables virtual testing of SIPROTEC 5 protection devices in the cloud.
Klaus Nonnen
India-Consultant | AI-Consultant | AI Champion at Siemens | Co-Owner of Indo-German Business Support | Member of the Indo-German Center for Business Excellence
Engineering and commissioning of a complex energy distribution substation takes a lot of time and can often only be carried out after the hardware of the substation has been set up.
The SIPROTEC 5 Digital Twin provides the digital duplicate of a real SIPROTEC device, which is cloud based and which has the same functionality and performance as a real device. The access is browser-based.
Now tests can be done before or during the set-up of the real substation, means the settings of a protection device can be tested very fast without any additional hardware. Protection devices connected via Goose or protection interface can be simulated and tested as well. Especially the communication between them.
This results in many new services that can be offered and that makes work easier and more effective for the customer.
These would be, for example, engineering, virtual commissioning, and maintenance services via Digital Twin.
It starts with the engineering services, which can be carried out quickly and cost-effectively in cooperation with the customer of the protection devices. This includes creating a project, based on the customer requirements, implementing the settings and testing them. The customer can always observe the work online and adjust if necessary. Especially the customer-specific Continuous Function Charts (CFC) can now be tested very easily and with less effort.
After the Engineering Phase the Commissioning Phase takes place.
That means that services regarding virtual commissioning come into the picture now. Commissioning test cases can be carried out in advance, which saves time and money during the actual commissioning.
In cooperation with the customer, commissioning coaching and customer training can also take place in this phase. This makes it much easier for employees to start up later.
Once the system has been successfully commissioned, it must be kept up to date, which is done in the Maintenance Phase.
Here, too, there are many services that can be carried out with the help of the digital twin, such as testing new firmware versions, updates and adjustments to the settings as well as constant optimization of the substation.
SIPROTEC 5 protection devices record a wide range of different measured values and grid status data to protect and automate the electrical distribution network. The innovative SIPROTEC 5 Digital Twin is a further milestone on the way of the digitalization of energy automation systems.
Commissioning Superintendent & Chartered Electrical Engineer passionate about our low carbon future.
4yA cool step for me would be to have Engineering Contractors produce Protection Settings Schedules in a standardized format, somewhat aligned across industries and for the various IED manufacturers. For upload (input) of settings into those IEDs to be a simple one click activity, followed by on-site testing of course, and then for download of actual settings (output) and comparison to automatically produce an exception report. In my industry we would then expect each deviation to be justified / documented. At the moment as an industry I feel we are doing far too much of this kind of thing very manually and it feels very last century! Not least because comparing two long lists of parameters is something computers do far better at than people.
Commissioning Superintendent & Chartered Electrical Engineer passionate about our low carbon future.
4yYes! I had a vision of this idea years ago, testing a virtual IEC61850 network with each individual firmware versions / IED families (not just SIPROTEC either!) and get all the de-bugging out the way before we get to site! Can you model different Ethernet switches present in the system too.... A boy can dream!