Application Advantages of Our Industrial Switch In Digital Substation

The so-called digital substation is to convert all the information acquisition, transmission, processing and output processes of the substation from the analog information in the past to digital information, and establish the corresponding communication network and system.

For a long time, the supporting standard IEC60870-5-103 for relay protection information interface issued by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1997 has been widely used in the mainstream substation automation system in China. Due to the early formulation of the protocol and the limitation of technical conditions, with the rapid development of Ethernet and intelligent digital equipment today, its defects are increasingly obvious, which directly leads to the poor interoperability between equipment from different manufacturers in the construction process of substation automation system. The interconnection between equipment from different manufacturers requires protocol conversion equipment, which requires a lot of information point-to-point work, and the workload of substation automation system integration increases, The system information processing efficiency is low.

With the development of secondary equipment and systems in substations, equipment integration and information integration have become an inevitable trend. It is urgent to have a unified information platform to realize the entire automation system. In order to unify the substation communication protocol, unified data model, unified interface standard, realize the seamless connection of data exchange, realize the interoperability of products from different manufacturers, and reduce the waste of conversion between different protocols in the process of data exchange, the IEC TC57 working group, based on the IEEE protocol UCA2.0, organized the formulation of IEC61850 - substation communication network and system series standards, which was officially released in 2004.

IEC61850 is an international standard on the structure and data communication of substation automation system. Its purpose is to achieve interoperability and information sharing between intelligent electronic equipment of different manufacturers in the substation through a standard (protocol). The power industry, especially the substation environment, has very strict requirements for digital network communication. According to the requirements of IEC61850 series of standards, Industrial Switch products should meet at least four categories of requirements, including functional requirements, electromagnetic compatibility design requirements, wide temperature environment requirements and mechanical structure verification.

In terms of functionality, there are at least two most important points. First, the industrial switch is required to support fast forwarding and QoS service quality to ensure the real-time transmission of important GSE/GOOSE data packets in IEC61850 standard, and to support multicast communication management IGMP snooping. The second is that the industrial switch must be able to support the construction of redundant network topology, such as ring network architecture, to improve the reliability of the topology, and at the same time can provide extremely short network fault recovery time. In addition, it also includes technical function test requirements such as VLAN, priority and fast spanning tree.

In terms of electromagnetic compatibility design, industrial switches should be able to pass tests including electric shock, lightning stroke and other electromagnetic interference; In terms of wide temperature environment requirements, industrial switch equipment must be able to work normally under the extreme temperature environment of - 40 ℃~85 ℃; In terms of mechanical structure requirements, industrial switch equipment should also pass the vibration and shock tolerance test of a professional third party.


Now in the Chinese market, more and more industrial switch manufacturers are launching products that meet the IEC61850 standard of the power industry. As the main equipment of digital substation communication system, our industrial switch adopts strict standards, which can be used stably, reliably and safely for a long time under various extreme industrial conditions, providing guarantee for digital substation. Its performance and application advantages are shown in the following aspects:

(1) The industrial switch supports fast storage and forwarding mode and QoS service level to ensure the instant transmission of key GOOSE data packets in the network;

(2) The industrial switch is applicable to VLAN based on port and TAG tag to realize network segment isolation, ensure real-time and reliable transmission of core data and suppress network broadcast storm;

(3) Industrial switches support redundant network topologies, such as ring networks and star networks, to improve network reliability;

(4) The industrial switch supports RSTP to quickly generate trees, improve the convergence speed in case of network problems, prevent network loopback and curb the network broadcast storm;

(5) The industrial switch supports IGMP multicast technology, which limits the data in the network and ensures the real-time and reliability of the network.