19EEE401 Power System

Protection and Switchgear

 Introduction
• A protection scheme in a power system is designed to
continuously monitor the power system to ensure
maximum continuity of electrical supply with minimum
damage to life, equipment, and property.
• To design protective schemes,
• understand the fault characteristics of the individual power system elements.
• Understand the tripping characteristics of various protective relays
• The design has to ensure that relays will detect undesirable
conditions and then trip to disconnect the area affected, but
remain restrained at all other times.
• Protective relays are meant to detect the effects of faults.
What and where was the fault?

• Power system is complex and dynamic, accurate determination of fault

and its location is important to take corrective action on time, else may
result in system wide disturbance.

How to prevent faults and how to mitigate the

consequences of faults?
 Quickly isolate the faulty element from rest of the
healthy system
 Nature and Causes of Faults
• Faults are caused either by insulation failures or by conducting
path failures.
• Most of the faults on transmission and distribution lines are
caused by over voltages due to lightning or switching surges, or
by external conducting objects falling on overhead lines.
• Over voltages due to lightning or switching surges cause
flashover on the surface of insulators resulting in short circuits.
• certain foreign particles, such as fine cement dust in industrial
areas or salt in coastal areas or any dirt in general accumulates
on the surface of string and pin insulators reduces their
insulation strength and causes flashovers.
 Nature and Causes of Faults
• Short circuits are also caused by tree branches or other
conducting objects falling on the overhead lines.
• If animal touch one of the phases and the earth wire.
• If the conductors are broken, there is a failure of the conducting
path and the conductor becomes open-circuited. If the broken
conductor falls to the ground, it results in a short circuit.
• Joint failures on cables or overhead lines.
• The opening of one or two of the three phases makes the system
unbalanced. Unbalanced currents flowing in rotating machines
set up harmonics, thereby heating the machines in short periods
of time.
 Nature and Causes of Faults
• Other causes of faults on overhead lines are: direct lightning
strokes, ice and snow loading, abnormal loading, storms,
earthquakes, creepers, etc.
• In the case of cables, transformers, generators and other
equipment, the causes of faults are: failure of the solid
insulation due to aging, heat, moisture or overvoltage,
mechanical damage, accidental contact with earth or earthed
screens, flashover due to over voltages, etc.
• Sometimes, circuit breakers may trip due to errors in the
switching operation, testing or maintenance work, wrong
connections, defects in protective devices, etc.
• Faults occur due to the poor quality of system components or
because of a faulty system design.
Short Circuit(Shunt) fault:
• Symmetrical (L-L-L-G)
• unsymmetrical (L-G, L-L-G, & L-L)

Open Circuit fault:

 Occurs when one or more phase conductors break or a cable joint
or a joint on the overhead lines fails, circuit breakers or isolators
open but fail to close one or more phases. Due to the opening of
one or two phases, unbalanced currents flow in the system,
thereby heating rotating machines.
Fault Statistics
Effects of Faults

• Heavy short circuit current may cause damage to equipment

or any other element of the system due to overheating and
high mechanical forces set up due to heavy current.
• Arcs associated with short circuits may cause fire hazards. It
may spread to rest of the system.
• There may be reduction in the supply voltage of the healthy
feeders, resulting in the loss of industrial loads.
• Short circuits may cause the unbalancing of supply voltages
and currents, thereby heating rotating machines.
Effects of Faults

• There may be a loss of system stability. Individual generators

in a power station may lose synchronism, resulting in a
complete shutdown of the system. Loss of stability of
interconnected systems may also result. Subsystems may
maintain supply for their individual zones but load shedding
would have to be resorted in the sub-system which was
receiving power from the other subsystem before the
occurrence of the fault.
• Interruption of supply to consumers, thereby causing a loss
of revenue.
Need for Protective Systems

• Heavy current associated with Short circuits and other abnormal

conditions may damage equipment.
• The fault must be cleared within a fraction of a second. If a short
circuit persists on a system for a longer, it may cause damage to
important sections of the system.
• A heavy short circuit current may cause a fire. It may spread in the
system and damage a part of it.
Need for Protective Systems

• The damage caused by faults is of two kinds: (i) thermal

damage, and (ii) electro-dynamic damage to the electrical
equipment.
• High current heat the conductors and thus the insulators, if not
prevented insulation failure occurs.
• When the fault current exceeds 8 –10 times the full-load rating
of the equipment, the repelling forces generated due to this
large current would deshape and destruct the whole equipment
structurally. The instantaneous tripping feature is required to be
used to avoid such an ‘electro-dynamic’ damage; as such
destruction would occur just within 6 to 8 cycles .
Need for Protective Systems
• Faults can be transient (temporary) in nature or sustained. The
power arc between two phases or flashover across line insulator
due to overvoltage is a transient fault. It may take a few cycles
or few seconds.
• The relay would sense the fault and clear it. But, if the faulty
line is catering to a large amount of power, the generators may
go out of step.
• If the damage due to such a transient fault is likely to occur
after 4 seconds, the breaker should trip after about 3 seconds,
since the transient fault may have subsided after about a second.
• Thus unnecessary early tripping of a transmission line or any
other electrical equipment may sometimes more likely cause
power-system instability.
Need for Protective Systems

Single line-to-ground
fault due to flashover
of insulator string
 Need for Protective Systems
• Very high-fault current can cause destruction or damage to the
equipment of a power system, and the voltage would drop
drastically. The synchronism between machines working in the
system could be lost and the power system can most likely
become unstable if the fault persists. This can lead to
widespread blackout of power.
• A protective relay does not anticipate or prevent the occurrence
of a fault, rather it takes action only after a fault has occurred,
except Buchholz relay.
• To prevent damage to the equipment/system an automatic
protection system to be implemented, it isolates the faulty
element as quickly as possible to keep the healthy section of the
system in normal operation.
 Functions of Protective Relay
Schemes
• To operate the correct circuit breakers so as to disconnect only
the faulty equipment from the system as quickly as possible,
thus minimizing the trouble and damage caused by faults when
they do occur
• To operate the correct circuit breakers to isolate the faulty
section from the healthy system in case of abnormalities like
overloads, unbalance, under-voltage, etc.
• To clear the fault before the system becomes unstable
• To identify distinctly as to where the fault has occurred
 Components of a Protection
System
• A protective system includes
circuit breakers, transducers
(CTs and VTs), and protective
relays.
• Protective relay detect the
fault and issue a command to
the circuit breaker to
disconnect the faulty element.
 Components of a Protection
System
• A circuit breaker is a mechanical switching device capable of
making, carrying and breaking currents under normal circuit
conditions and also making, carrying for a specified time, and
automatically breaking currents under specified abnormal
circuit condition such as the faults.
• The transducers, i.e., the current and voltage transformers (CTs
and VTs) are used to reduce currents and voltages to standard
lower values and to isolate protective relays from the high
voltages of the power system.
 Components of a Protection
System
• Relay senses abnormal conditions on a power system (fault,
over speed of generators and motors, overvoltage, under
frequency, loss of excitation, overheating of stator and rotor of
an alternator etc.) by constantly monitoring electrical quantities
of the systems, which differ under normal and abnormal
conditions.
• Ex: current, voltage, phase-angle (direction) and frequency.
 Protective relays utilize one or more of these quantities to
detect abnormal conditions in a power system.
 Components of a Protection
System
• When a fault occurs in the
protected circuit (i.e., the line in
this case), the relay connected to
the CT and VT actuates and closes
its contacts to complete the trip
circuit. Current flows from the
battery in the trip circuit. As the
trip coil of the circuit breaker is
energized, the circuit breaker
operating mechanism is actuated
and it operates for the opening
operation to disconnect the faulty
element.
 ZONES OF PROTECTION
• Separate protective scheme
for each piece of equipment
or element of the power
system
• A protective zone covers
one or at the most two
elements of a power
system.
• Adjacent protective zones
must overlap each other,
failing which a fault on the
boundary of the zones may
not lie in any of the zones
and hence no circuit
breaker would trip.
ZONES OF PROTECTION
Requirements of a Protective
system
• Reliability: It depicts the quality of the protective system. Less
the probability of failure, better the reliability. Failure can occur
in relays, circuit breakers, and control circuits and due to
erroneous conversion by system transducers. Regular and
thorough maintenance of protective equipment, knowledge of
personnel operating the system and inherent design features and
fabrication make the protective system reliable.
• Selectivity: It means isolation of a faulty section exclusively
from the rest of the healthy system. Selectivity is absolute if the
protection operates for internal faults in any element of the
power system. Selectivity is said to be relative if coordinated
settings of protective relays of different zones are decided based
on certain rules.
 Requirements of a Protective
system
• Speed: faster the speed of
operation of elements of a
protective system lesser
damage to the equipment.
Relays should not be made to
operate faster than 5 to 10 ms,
as otherwise they may
unnecessarily operate due to
transient conditions like
lightning and switching
surges.

Power transfer during various faults

without loss of synchronism
 Requirements of a Protective
system
• Discrimination: A protective system should be able to discriminate
between fault and load conditions even when the minimum fault
current is less than the maximum load current.
• Stability: The term stability is often used to describe the quality of
a protective system by virtue of which it remains inoperative under
specified conditions usually associated with high values of fault
currents.
• Sensitivity: It refers to the minimum level of fault current at which
operation occurs. It is the fault setting and is usually expressed in
operating quantity referred to the primary of a transducer
 Primary & Backup protection
• If a fault occurs in a particular zone, it is the duty of the primary
relays of that zone to isolate the faulty element. The primary relay
is the first to act. If due to any reason, the primary relay fails to
operate, there is a back-up protective scheme to clear the fault.
Primary & Backup protection
coordinated operation
Primary & Backup protection
coordinated operation
Primary & Backup protection
Mal-operation
Primary & Backup protection
Mal-operation