Background
With the growth in industrialization and electricity access across the globe, electrical power consumption continues to grow at a rapid pace and therefore, it becomes very important to efficiently and skillfully manage power distribution and consumption. Automation in the power sector has become a requirement as it enables smart grids that can control and monitor power to minimize losses, improve reliability and productivity, manage demand cost-effectively and enable future-capacity planning.
Substation automation involves specialized hardware and software, using collected data from IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices), SCADAs (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems), and HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces) to streamline substation operations and monitoring, and allow the substation to be controlled from near or far, depending on the acute needs of the utility.
Requirements
Substation automation has many benefits, including helping utilities improve reliability, asset management, and cost-saving. A leading power infrastructure engineering service company came to Lanner seeking a 3U IEC 61850 certified industrial computer for their power distribution network. They seek to adopt Lanner’s solution to replace their existing legacy 4U industrial computers. The rackmount industrial computer system needed to meet the following requirements:
- Critical Infrastructure Ready – The industrial appliance must be compliant with IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 standards to meet the required robustness in power substation environments.
- Redundant Power Supply – The platform system must be high-availability and maintenance-friendly, with a redundant power supply in AC+DC or dual DC power inputs for continuous operation during maintenance and prevent network service interruption.
- Wide Operating Temperature – The rugged computing system must be able to sustain harsh environments without sacrificing operation safety and productivity.
- ECC Memory Support – Hardware equipment in substations may generate high volume of data, and to assure data integrity, ECC (error-correcting code) memory is a necessary mechanism to correct data corruption in memory areas, increasing reliability in substation environments.
- Configurable Hardware Watchdog - Watchdog timer 256 level time interval system reset, software programmable
- Multiple I/O Features – The platform system requires multiple I/O connectivity for sensors and relays, DVI and Display port video outputs, and Ethernet connectivity for IEC 61850 IEDs.
Solution
With its scalable memory, LEC-3340 is a powerful 3U rackmount industrial computer system designed to implement modern IT infrastructure to reduce hardware costs and increase availability and security. LEC-3340 can run several virtual machines while assigning each of them the resources of a standalone system for virtualization and cybersecurity.
LEC-3340 is powered by Intel® Xeon® E3-1505L V6 or CoreTM i5-7442EQ (formerly Kaby Lake-H) processor, offering outstanding performance and vProTM technology. The system features multiple I/O functions and ECC memory storage including 4x PCIe slots, 4x RJ-45 GbE LAN ports, 5x USB 3.0 ports, 2x 2.5” swappable drive bays, DP/DVI display port, and 2x isolated COM ports, to consolidate multiple workloads for various protocols connecting substations. For the industrial environment, LEC-3340 is compliant with IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 standards and supports -40~70°C wide operating temperatures to withstand harsh environments.