Visualization and control of the power supply system at the Technical University of Malaysia Malacca

September 7, 2023 | Reliance SCADA

The Technical University of Malaysia Malacca (Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka – UTeM) was established on December 1, 2000, as Malaysia's first public technical university. UTeM boasts strengths in engineering, IT, and technology management.





UTeM's power supply system

UTeM offers its students various engineering courses, one of which is the Electrical Engineering course. UTeM has developed a power distribution laboratory that is used to simulate the management of power distribution so that students can experience and learn from the very first process up to the final stages of the power distribution system.


Electrical energy is supplied by TNB (Tenaga Nasional Berhad), Malaysia's grid supplier. The whole system is controlled by a vacuum circuit breaker, which enables cutting off power to all loads in case of a short circuit or electrical malfunction. The system also applies an air circuit breaker, which is used to control the delivery of power from TNB, and a motorized circuit breaker for power cut-off control from the backup power source (motor–generator).


All the safety features/circuit breakers mentioned above lead to the outputs of the system, which are three load banks consisting of resistive load, inductive load, and capacitive load. These loads consume power from the main supply.


In addition, there are two main switchboards and a sub-switchboard. These three units are crucial to the monitoring of the load banks' power usage by a digital power meter. The power monitoring system also consists of a set of ABB REJ601 protection relays.


On top of that, the power supply system uses an Allen-Bradley PowerMonitor 5000 power meter to analyze and monitor power quality and simultaneously communicates over an OPC server to the Reliance SCADA system's Control Server.



Control system

In 2022, the Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technology implemented a system for the control and monitoring of the electrical supply. It consists of a Beckhoff CX5010 PLC and the Reliance SCADA/HMI system.


Reliance Smart Client, which is installed on six computers, allows students to view the Reliance visualization project via any Web browser without a hassle.


Among other things, the following features can be monitored and controlled by Reliance SCADA:


  • Circuit breakers (vacuum, air, motorized)
  • Variable-frequency drive
  • Load banks (resistive, inductive, capacitive – contactors)
  • All equipment's ON/OFF states
  • All gates' OPEN/CLOSED states


Examples of visualization windows



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