Human aspects related to IEC 61850 testing: How to believe or don't believe in testing

摘要

Since beginning of electricity, testing of electrical devices were done utilizing a small replica of the main network components. As it is impossible to visualize the physical phenomena (electrons circulating), in the mind of those old engineers it was create a belief of the phenomena by manipulating rheostats and dials and visualizing the movement of needles in the instrumentation. As technology evolves, and relays and other instruments become digital, but still electrical in sensing; it appears more sophisticated test equipment, where the internal process start visualizing a screen where engineers write numbers. Inside the test machine, the value written is digitalized, converted to electrical signals and sent to the device, but again, engineer cannot see all process and he believes that what is happening in the test machine and in the device under test is true. IEC 61850 [1] is being implemented in areas before dominated exclusively by electricity. With new devices, where the communication aspects become crucial, testing procedure approaches more and more with the one used to test software than hardware. Paper describes testing procedures evolution and how we forecast that it will be done in future, analysing the impact in process, minds and believes.