THE NEED FOR POWER PROTECTION SYSTEMS IN INDUSTRY

BY

D G DUNCAN
(SPECIALIST CONSULTANT TO)
(TEST-A-RELAY & RON SLATEM & ASSOC.)

Synopsis: Relay Protection used in electrical power systems developed from the need to improve
reliability of the supply and to minimise damage to equipment and financial loss. The cost
of such protection has to be off set by the improvement obtained.

1.0 THE NEED FOR ELECTRICAL PROTECTION SYSTEMS

DEFINITION

Electrical Relay Protection consists of the current transformers, voltage transformers

breakers, tripping batteries and a variety of relays whose main duty is to monitor the
electrical supply system and trip the appropriate breaker/s which will isolate an electrical
fault.

RELIABILITY OF ELECTRICAL SUPPLY

An industry’s final profit will depend on the the most efficient usage of the capital invested.
This requires that the electrical power is effectively available for 100% of the plants
operating time, however, no equipment can be guaranteed to be 100% reliable.

Protection systems cannot prevent faults, thus outages will occur. But the extent and the
duration of the outage must be minimised, which can be accomplished by using adequate
protection. As improving protection will cost more, management needs to assess the risk
of failures and their cost against the cost of the protection which could be installed,
including it’s LIFE CYCLE cost, for maintenance and replacement.

No perfect protection philosophy design exists as each industry has it’s own peculiar
problems and each case must be judged on it’s own merits. The philosophy for a particular
industry needs to be set out at the design stage of a project to ensure that the industries
requirements are covered and that expensive modifications are not required later, eg. the
size of motors being started DOL relative to transformer size, or the number of breakers in
series in a radial system.

MINIMISING EQUIPMENT DAMAGE

Any fault which occurs will generally result in some damage, eg. ionised air at the point of
fault burns insulationand creates explosions, excess current creates thermal stresses,
overvoltage creates stress on the insulation.

Whereas in electrical supply where overhead lines are a major component and faults on
them may be transient with minimal damage, most electrical equipment in industry is
usually damaged by a fault. Such equipment consists of transformers, switchgear, cables,
motors etc.
 2
A fault in industry thus results in equipment down time and loss of production.

Adequate protection can reduce the duration of the fault and thus the amount of damage
caused. This allows equipment to be repaired more easily and at a lower cost as well
reducing the time to return the equipment to service and production.

REDUCING DANGER TO PERSONNEL AND AVOIDING INJURIES

A similar result of aqequate protection is the reduction of the energy created at the point of
fault and thus the possibility of explosions or expulsion of very hot gases. This will reduce
the risk of injury to personnel in the immediate vacinity of a fault.

This aspect of protection has both moral, social and legal implications for management,
who could be held responsible under the OHS Act if insuffifient protection is installed and
installed protection is not correctly maintained because of inadequate management or staff
training.

SELECTIVITY OF PROTECTION OPERATION

Even if protection removes a faulty piece of equipment rapidly, reliability of electrical

supply can be impaired if healthy equipment is unnecessarily isolated at the same time.

Protection philosophy should ensure that the minimum of equipment is isolated when a
fault occurs so that as much of the plant as possible remains running after fault clearance.

As many industries have processes which are sequential and interdependant, loss of any
component of the process may require the shutdown of the entire line. Thus at the design
stage of the plant, redundancy of equipment and the associated electrical protection must
be considered together to ensure the best overall performance.

In some cases, the simpliest protection may be adequate as the entire process may have to
shutdown for the loss of any section of the process. Here reliable high speed operation of
protection may be the best solution to minimise damage and loss of production.

RELIABILITY OF PROTECTION SYSTEMS

Even though protection is essential, the probability that it will ever be needed is low. This
leads to protection being in service for many years before it is required to operate.
However, when required to operate it must operate as per design. This requirement can
only be ensured with equipment designed and tested to IEC 255 or equivalent standards.
The use of less reliable equipment and inaddequate initial installation and commissioning
can result in unnecessary and expensive shutdowns.

Protection systems can be compared to Life Insurance. It always seems to be a cost which
does not result in any tangible benefit until an accident / fault occurs. After such an
accident / fault, the perceived need for protection is very high, but this perception
diminishes as the inverse of the cube of the time since the last accident / fault.

2.0 THE PHYSICAL MAINTENANCE OF PROTECTION

Protection equipment needs to be correctly commissioned and subsequently maintained

like any other plant. The importance of this is highlighted by the fact that CIGRE initiated
an investigation which resulted in Working Group 34-06 producing a report “ Maintenance
and Management of Protection Systems”
 3

Unfortunately, this commissioning and maintenance is often neglected as the protection

usually does not affect plant operation when equipment is in a healthy state. Only
maltripping will cause the protection to be checked, thus inoperative protection may exist
for many years before failure to operate results in checks being carried out.

Initial design of the protection should allow for ease of maintenance and maintainability.
This involves the use of test blocks for injection during testing, and the use of rack-in
relays to allow the easy and rapid replacement of any faulty relay.

The relay maunfacturer and the local supplier also form an important point for decision
based on:

A) long term product support especially with software in numeric relays

B) ability to provide rapid repair facilities

C) provision of information to assess reliabiltity and LIFE CYCLE costs

D) provision of back up support to assess correct relay operation

The older types of electromechanical protection have provided very reliable service even
without maintenance. However, tarnishing of contacts, corrosion of leads and
deterioration of insulation does occur so that checks on Relays, CTs, VTs, Batteries, etc.
should be carried out at typically two year intervals.

The more modern electronic relays have improved the available functionality and range
capabilities of the protection systems. But at the same time these relays have introduced
disadvantages, namely:-

a) higher DC loads on batteries and chargers

b) many more components which even with their higher individual reliability can
have an overall lower Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF)

c) the use of electrolytic capacities in power supplies results in a need for

systematic change / replacement of these components after about eight years

d) failure of a component leads to a higher loss of protection facilities as more

functions are integrated into one relay unit

The above results in an increased maintenance requirement for the relays i.e. once yearly
while the other components of the protection system and their maintenance have remained
substantially the same (CTs, VTS etc.).

The currently designed NUMERICAL relays have attempted with various success to
provide built in diagnostic / testing facilities. These facilities can remove the need for
regular maintenance, which in itself can lead to “finger trouble” when the maintenance by
inadequately trained personnel results in protection malfunctions or inadvertent trips.

These diagnostic systems cannot prevent protection failure. They must, however, be
inherently failsafe in terms of the alarms that they provide. The alarms must be made
available at a suitable point where management can be certain that action will be invoked
to correct the problem.
 4
Too often alarms have been considered spurious or unimportant and have been ignored or
blocked so that protection has remained out of service for months or years - Three Mile
Island!! Adequate training of operating staff is thus very important.

Alarms should also be grouped in such a way that essential alarms are easily recognised
compared to those used for information only. Flags and alarms for protection must not
operate during normal start ups eg. undervoltage and underfrequency, so that they have to
be reset when the startup is complete. Such flags and alarms are often left operated,
leading to later confusion in analysing fault operation, or result in operators mistrusting the
alarm system.

Modern computer controlled testing equipment has improved the ability of personnel who
test the protection systems, to repeat the actual tests in a consistent mannner. The use of
computer control allows fixed test routines and control values to be used for tests and the
results can be compared to previous results by the same program, highlighting only those
results which are out of specification.

Use of this modern equipment can reduce the technical skills required of the maintenance
personnel. However, such equipment is expensive and requires the initial use of well
trained people to set up such a comprehensive maintenance system.

The need for spare protection relays being held by the Plant’s stores has to be linked to:-

a) the cost of holding spares

b) the guaranteed holding of spares by the supplier (roll over of stock)

c) the future availibility of the specific relay

d) the cost of extended down time to find an alternative relay and modify circuits

e) the time and cost to repair older relays

3.0 THE MAINTENANCE OF PROTECTION SYSTEM DATA

Protection relay settings should be calculated for the system conditions defined by the
Plant Operation Manager and the ratings of the available equipment.

This information gathers together important data which needs to be readily available for
future fault analysis, change of operating methods, modification of the plants electrical
sytems and comparison to the latest recorded values obtained during maintenance.

This information has usually been recorded manually on paper and is often filed on a
random basis which makes future access difficult.
 5
Associated with this data is the schematic diagrams for the switchgear plus it’s relays and
the maintenance manuals for relays and switchgear. For assisting the protection
maintenance personnel and the operating staff in the plant, a functional operating diagram
of the protection should be available. The functional diagrams should be available “AS
BUILT” and may be supplied by the switchgear manufacturer as part of his group of
schematic diagrams.

The schematic drawings need to be “AS BUILT” and must be maintained as up-to-date
drawings, which is part of the protection maintenance system. This leads to the problem
that the switchgear manufacturer generally produces his drawings for the actual switchgear
and does not include detailed information of interconnection for SCADA, metering,
connection to field contacts and monitoring units. This detail is often spread out on
numerous other documents, making an integrated set of drawings difficult to obtain and
thus they are often not available.

Some of the modern relays have multiple relay outputs which can be selected by means of
a matrix for the internal functions which will operate them. The matrix selection is often
perceived to be settings for the person doing the settings to define. This is considered to
be incorrect as this matrix determines wether the relay can perform the tripping as required
and defined in the functional specification. For this reason, the designer who lays out the
schematic diagram has to check how he is able to use the matrix to provide the tripping
functions, which implies that the matrix is in fact part of the “wiring”. The Project
Engineer’s representative should thus insist that the switchgear manufacturer includes the
matrix setting as part of the schematic diagram, as the “wiring” is incomplete without this
matrix setting information.

The matrix settings must also be included in the relay setting sheets or computer files so as
to provide a complete list of setting details for the person applying the settings to the
relays.

Without an integrated set of drawings, even a well trained technician will struggle during
commissioning, fault finding and maintenance.

The management of data / drawings must thus start at the design stage where the most
comprehensive drawing produced, ususally by the switchgear manufacturer, must be linked
in the supply contract to the requirement of producing complete as built drawings. The
Responsible Person for the project needs to coordinate the final production of
comprehensive drawings and an additional cost allowed for the contractor to include other
detail in his drawings.

A further problem which can be cost effectively resolved at the design stage, is that the
tender documents stipulate that the drawings are produced on a CAD system suitable to
the Plants data system. Otherwise the manufacturer will hold the originals for a limited
time period after which they will be archived or discarded. Reverse engineering drawings
for which no comprehensive “AS BUILT” copies or “MASTERS”exist will be very
expensive. Often, if the Planrt Manager is lucky, only one hand marked up copy exists on
site. If this is lost or destroyed, fault finding and maintenance become extremely difficult
or impossible within reasonable time periods.

Computers have made the possibility of keeping records much easier. However, hard
copies of manufacturer’s data cannot be easily captured for computer records. Master
copies of such data must be managed and kept safe. The recent fire in Pretoria Municipal
offices which destroyed their drawing office records highlights this problem.
 6
Often the settings for protection are done by the Plant’s Project personnel or their
Consultant / Contractor during commissioning. Their initial philosophy could differ from
that of the Plant Manager and operating staff and may not even be defined in detail for any
assessment by the future operating staff. Thus detailed information relating to such
settings must be obtained from the project personnel who aquire very specific knowledge
during the staring of new plant. This information must not be lost to those who have to
manage the plant for the next 20 - 30 years.

The difficulty in maintaining this data base is increased ifthe project personnel do not have
a consistent way of presenting the data, especially when various contractors are held
responsible for only their part of the plant.

As protection can be supplied from various manufacturers, even computer generated data
and files may be incompatible, i.e. not even using the same soft ware which may result in
plant maintenance personnel having to acquire various software packages and having to
develop a basic proficiency in these these various programs. Compatibility with
“Windows” (a system standard??) can reduce this problem to some extent.

The insistence that manufacturers produce drawings for a specific CAD package used by
the Plant will allow drawings to be maintained easily.

An overall management system of keeping a record of the data needs to be installed so the
finding of specific data is simplified and can be accessed from different starting
information, e.g. :-

1) Panel No

2) Plant Item NO

3) Schematic Drawing No

4) Manufacturer’s equipment description (where use in plant)

5) etc.

The installation of such a data system will require much initial thought, but will make
future maintenance and design modification easier as corrct information will be available.

An associate problem with information is the rapid change of software used in a relay. The
relay manufacturer needs to have a well organised record system in order to track the
software installed in a particular relay. The minimum requirement is that the software
version can be down loaded from the relay to assess that the software is a version without
errors or bugs, according to the supplier’s information. Haphazard changing of soft ware
in a relay has already led to incompatibility between settings, manufacturer’s literature and
relay final operation. This incompatibility has a cost implication for all involved and can
result in incorrect operation of protection.

4.0 THE TRAINING OF PERSONNEL USED FOR PROTECTION

Most medium sized plants are unable to employ staff specifically for maintenance of
protection. Staff used for normal electrical maintenance must be used when required to
carry out the necessary maintenance of protection equipment.
 7
Traditional methods of testing would use highly trained staff using manual test injection
gear to inject relays and prove operation. All results were (are) logged manually. These
highly trained staff are often not available in small plants.

As protection is often in the back ground and seldom thought about, as maloperations
should be minimal, the staff often do not have time to learn about complex relays and
systems. Thus when a fault occurs and protection operates, the staff may not be able to
rapidly assess the problem correctly.

Besides the maintenance personnel, the operating staff also need to have a working
knowledge of the protection as there may be no maintenance personnel immediately
available when the fault occurs. To minimise down time of plant, the operators must be
able to assess the problem rapidly from the information available in order to return plant to
service or call out the correct maintenance personnel to deal with more problematic
failures.

Where operating staff are not properly trained, they may reset alarm information which
may be essential in assessing the actual cause of failure. This could allow a latent problem
to re-occur and cause further loss of production and damage.

Protection forms only part of the training required by operators and maintenance staff, but
is considered a very important part if maximium availibilty of plant is to be ensured.

In South Africa, most of the protection training is made available by:-

i) Eskom to it’s own staff

ii) Relay Manufacturer’s as specialised or general courses

iii) Some of the larger Municipalities and Companies

iv) Private Protection companies and Consultants

Much of the knowledge obtained by staff in smaller companies is by on job self training
when problems occur. Smaller companies must either hire skilled staff or make use of
training offered by the Manufacturers, which may unfortunately be biased towards their
own products instead of being of a fundamental protection knowledge basis.

Management needs to assess the needs of their staff relative to the cost of extended
outages because of incorrect assessment of plant failures.

5.0 THE EVALUATION OF PROTECTION OPERATION FOR ACTUAL FAULTS

The cost of the protection installed on a plant can be relatively high.

When faults do occur, the operation of protection with regard to hardware and settings
needs to be recorded and evaluated to ensure that correct operation has occurred.

The availabilty of reliable past history, setting data and protection function diagrams is
now essential for an educated assessment to be made. This assessment will allow the
correct decision to be made for follow up action which may be necessary, eg. repeated
failure of a particular manufacturer’s type of equipment may require total replacement.
 8
The detailed history kept under data management will allow an objective decision to be
made. Where an assessment is made on “remembered” details, a costly incorrect decision
often results.

The older types of protection result in operation alarms being the only availble information
available. This information needs to be recorded manually, but should then preferable be
transferred to a data base for initial assessment and historical record keeping for possible
future use.

The more modern electronic relays often record the levels of fault current, function which
operated, voltage dip level, etc. for typically up to the last five faults. These need to be
extracted manually for further use. However, some of these relays include Communication
facilities to computers and with the appropriate software, far more detailed records can be
extracted.

The latest Numeric relays have options for far more detailed fault recording, including
records of waveforms during a fault. These waveform recordings can be used by modern
injection test sets to provide a replay of the fault condition when attempting to assess
protection operation or suspected malfunctions.

The above functions would probably be beyond the requirements of most smaller plant
management requirements. However, these functions are becoming more standard in the
newer relays, thus manament needs to define what data should be retained for future use.

Even with numerical relays and user friendly software, the skill burden for plant personnel
is increasing as each item of plant has it’s own learning curve.

For this reason, manufacturers are designing in communication protocols which allow their
relays to be coupled to a centralised computer which automatically logs all data from the
various relays. This can included real time data of loading etc. and records of operations
for faults.

The manufacturers are also experimenting with EXPERT systems which are intended to
sort incoming information and only output details of problems and maloperations. This
will become more and more necessary to reduce the work load on skilled staff.

As a standard protocol for the communication between relays and a centralised cumputer
system has not yet been established, the manufacturers have had to develop their own
protocols. This results in systems which cannot interchage information or use a common
program without separate interface programs. For this reason a plant would need to have
interfaces developed for the particular mix of protection employed in their system.

To minimise costs of an effective data capturing system, the designers need to limit the
number of different types of relays and manufacturers used. As more standard protocols
are developed and commercially available interfaces are written, this restriction may fall
away.

With the increasing use of PLCs for distributed intelligent control around a centralised
control room for many modern industrial plants, the integration of the relays’
communication systems with this process control system is possible. Many of the
numerical relays allow control of the breaker, allow additional contact inputs to be relayed
onwards and also supply data such as load current .

Combining process control and protection / data information can reduce costs by
eliminating separate control relays and transducers. However, many protection personnel
 9
tend to be conservative and not want other functions in the relays as the relay is the last
line of defence for clearing faults and the relay’s reliability can be impared when used for
other purposes as well.

6.0 CONCLUSION

In a modern economy there is a very high reliance on electrical power which needs to be as
close to 100% in reliability.

Protection systems contribute to this high availability of electrical power by minimising the
time of a fault on the system and limiting the equipment taken out of service in order to
remove the fault.

Although a perfect electrical system is not possible, the initial choice of relays, judicial use
of maintenace of protection and training of personnel can reduce the the Life Cycle cost of
protection and thus improve the availability of electrical power.

The mix of older type relays with modern numeric relays means the total self diagnostics of
by all relays will not be available in the near future and some traditional maintenance
procedures for protection will be necessary.