Abstract
This paper presents the development of a laboratory-scale testbed to investigate the behavior of synchronous generators under rated and abnormal operating conditions. A measurement platform is built that can be used with multiple machines in the lab. The platform is used to collect time-aligned, high resolution measurements of rotor speed, applied torque, load angle, terminal current, terminal voltage, field current, field voltage, and electric power. Results produced using testbed to perform online state estimation to characterize synchronous generator steady-state parameters are presented to demonstrate the performance of the testbed. An Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) based approach is applied to estimate the parameters of the laboratory generator. The estimated parameters are validated against IEEE 115 tests.