Received: 26 April 2017 | Accepted: 30 June 2017 DOI: 10.1002/cae.21859 RESEARCH ARTICLE Design and implementation of a real-time monitoring tool for power engineering education Juan S. Rocha-Doria 1 | Octavio A. Mosquera-Arevalo 1 | César Angeles-Camacho 2 | Alvaro Espinel-Ortega 1 | Jorge G. Calderón-Guizar 3 1 Research Group on Energy Management Systems, Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose of Caldas, Bogotá D.C., Colombia 2 Institute of Engineering, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México 3 Instituto Nacional de Electricidad y Energias Limpias, Cuernavaca, Morelos, México Correspondence Dr. Cesar Angeles-Camacho, Institute of Engineering, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, Bernardo Quintana Building, Ciudad Universitaria, Coyoacan, CDMX, Mexico. Email: cangelesc@iingen.unam.mx ABSTRACT This article reports on the implementation of a real-time monitoring system in a laboratory test grid based on synchrophasorial measurement units. The system consists of the installation of different types of units for monitoring the electrical parameters of the network. The information is transmitted to a power data concentrator equipment, through a local area network under TCP/IP protocol. All the information received is properly processed and systematically stored for future use. A graphical application was developed to visualize the information in real- time or to perform off-line power analyses. The functionality of the monitoring system was verified on several test grids and is used for teaching and research for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the power electronics laboratory at the Engineering Institute of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. KEYWORDS database, phasorial data concentrator, phasorial measurement unit, synchrophasorial 1 | INTRODUCTION The constant growth of the energy system infrastructure in response to the development of the different economic sectors (industry, transportation, trade, among others) demands a greater reliability on the daily operation of electric energy systems. This implies the application of new technologies to guarantee reliability in the operation of energy networks in the face of technical and operational problems or natural phenomena. Failure to achieve this objective can lead to cascading falls and system outages, resulting in a serious, negative impact on a country’s economy [3,10]. For this reason, the industrial sector has dedicated huge efforts to the development of technology and more efficient systems that allow a real-time monitoring of power systems. These technologies have been shown to improve both, the reliability and the energy quality of the system. At present, one of the available solutions is the implementation of synchrophasors or phasor measurement systems, composed of several Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), distributed throughout power systems, which supply the measurements of voltage, current, frequency and the frequency’s derivative, among others. Phasorial data concentrators (PDCs) are used to store a power system’s measurements needed by the applications to perform analysis in real-time, on-line, or off- line afterwards [13]. Currently, universities, industry and government have made many efforts to develop and implement applications over the power main by using synchrophasor technology [1,6–9,11,14–16]. In this paper, the main components of the real-time monitoring system based on synchrophasor technology called PDC UNAM-UD are presented. The name stand for Phasorial Data Concentrators, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Universidad Distrital. Several applications were Comput Appl Eng Educ. 2017;1–12. wileyonlinelibrary.com/cae © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. | 1