Measuring Techniques and Surge Testing

Measurement of Random disturbances

Need for Measurement - Occurrence of Electrical Transient is quite an unpredictable phenomena. Ex. Transients caused by lightning and by faults. - There are situations where the origin of transient is unknown which had caused failure of the equipment. - To identify and record such transients requires special equipments and techniques. In most of cases the measuring and recording system must operate unattended for a prolong period of time. - So the equipment must be rugged and highly reliable.

Transient Overvoltage level recorder

Sometimes it only needed to know that how often the voltage transients exceed the particular limit. This calls for a switch which will allow the counter to update when the transient voltage exceeds the limit ,otherwise not allow.

 When the surge signal exceeds the reset level the transistor is caused to turn on. This in turn turns on the thyristor T2 which acts as an amplifier releasing sufficient energy from a charged capacitor to operate the electromagnetic counter. Many such devices are connected in parallel at increasing sensing level. This helps in knowing how much transients have exceeded a particular voltage level.

Measuring points
80 MVA 765/138/34.5 KV

500 MVA 25/765KV Measuring points

 The measurement circuitry is same for both 765kV and 138kV circuit. The voltages are acquired from appropriate bushing capacitance tap. The metal enclosure is connected to the tap which contains a padding capacitor, a spark gap to protect from over voltages, a shorting switch to remove voltages from circuit in event of component failure and a line driver resistor to terminate measurement cable. The output of the padding capacitor is connected to the co-axial cable and steel conduit to the input of shielded fiber optic transmitter enclosure.

 The enclosure contains a low pass RC filter to damp oscillations on the cable, a metal oxide varistor to suppress potentially damaging transients , a compensated attenuator to reduce the voltage level, a buffer amplifier for impedance matching, a fiber optic transmitter module and a d.c. Supply.

 The monitored potentials are transmitted by means of fibre optic system from T1 and T3 to an EMI shielded instrumentation cabinet in the 765 kV switch yard. The transmission uses voltage-frequency and frequency-voltage conversions. The carrier frequency is 9.5 MHz which is modulated at 1 MHz. After filtering the output of the receiver is fed to digital recorder and to triggering circuit. The 12 channel 12 bit computer controlled recorder has a 200ksps sampling rate and can store temporarily two events consisting of 12 channels of 32284 samples each including 50ms of pre trigger. Triggering of recorder is accomplished whenever a phase voltage exceeds its nominal level by 15%, a high pass filtered (300 Hz cutoff) phase voltage exceeds 20% or the zero sequence (Va+Vb+Vc) exceeds 15%.

Random surge monitoring due to motor starting

1. 2. 3. 4.

The test was carried out on 33 machines of a power plant to find whether the fast transients, particularly on closing, could be threatening to inter-turn insulation. Recording system for motors switched by both air magnetic CB and vacuum CB were built. The system composed of :Wide band voltage dividers Digitizing unit for recording voltage w/f Trigger and timing circuit to control digitizers sampling rate Computer for data storage. The most important part of the transient to be measured or monitored is the initial steep fronted portion as it is the most destructive for the motors interturn insulation. So the sampling rate of the digitizer/DSO must be very high in this region. In case of motors switched with vacuum CB, have multiple transients. A monitoring system for this system must vary the digitizers sampling rate many times during one recording.

Specifications of Monitoring system of air magnetic CB switched motor.

Three capacitive voltage divider circuits connected to each phase, as close as to the motor terminal winding. The capacitive voltage divider circuits were constructed from 15kV class cable and had a bandwidth of 10 MHz and provided a division ratio of 200:1. The overall monitoring system is capable of recording voltage surges up to 40 kV with rise time as fast as 50 ns.

Specifications of Monitoring system of Vacuum CB switched motor.

Due to multiple re-ignitions in the vacuum CB during the switching more sophisticated instruments for recording need to be used which are capable of capturing large no of high speed transients. The system consists of :1. Three 200 MHz digitizers each of which is capable of sampling a voltage w/f every 5ns and can store up to 64K samples. 2. Voltage surges are detected by high voltage probes connected directly to the motor terminals. The probes are designed to withstand impulses of 40kV and provide a division ratio of 1000:1. 3. Surges with rise time as fast as 25ns could be recorded with 10% accuracy by monitoring system. 4. A custom trigger and timing circuit is used to control the rate of sampling of the digitizer.

Measurement of fast transients

There are occasions in power system studies where we need to do some high frequency measurements. So it is necessary to have equipment which can measure such high frequency signals. This may be because there are oscillations in the signal which may excited due to some switching or it is needed just as to resolve the very short rise time accurately.

 One such example is of the transients occurring in the GIS. When the disconnect switch is opened in a GIS it will disrupt or break a small capacitive current. In doing so it may some time re-strike. The same phenomena occurs while the closing of the contacts which is known as pre-strike. Due to the arrangement of the switch and bus i.e. its co-axial arrangement leads to a very low inductance of the circuit. The rise time of the re-striking voltage is given by tr=*sqrt(L*C). So as L and C are small so the rise time will be very small and hence the rate of sampling must be high to measure this time.

Some approaches for high frequency transients measurements

Problems due to interference in the measuring circuit and its remedy 1. The initial approaches of using the capacitance voltage divider in measuring random disturbances with small length of cable possesses a problem with measurement of fast transients. 2. When the transient voltage across a spark gapset to spark over between 15 and 20 kV was viewed and photographed at high sweep speeds, it was readily apparent that spurious high frequency signals were getting into both the horizontal and vertical deflection systems of the oscilloscope. Some of the coupling for the spurious signal was traced to the impedance of the ground circuit of the plug-in pre-amplifier. There was also a substantial amount of deflection caused by signals that penetrated the cabinet of the oscilloscope and some deflection was also caused by conduction into the cabinet over the a-c power supply to the oscilloscope.

3. A considerable reduction in spurious signals could be achieved by increasing the distance between the oscilloscope and the spark gap. Under certain conditions, the spurious signals could be practically eliminated by locating the oscilloscope in an adjacent laboratory room with separate power cable ducts and with the signal cable connected to a direct deflection adapter on the oscilloscope. 4. In one system, transmission of the highfrequency components of transient voltages over the long signal cable required by a remote location of the oscilloscope was accomplished by a differentiator-integrator combination.

The differentiator and integrator circuit

 The differentiator and integrator circuit is used where there is need of considerable attenuation of the signal. In this method the signal is first differentiated and the integrated to reconstitute it.

Differentiating circuit
-Voltage across R is proportional to the current and the voltage across capacitor is proportional to the integral of that current. - If the impedance offered by the capacitor is made dominant at the frequency of interest i.e. 1/C>> R1 then the voltage across C1 will be practically in phase with input voltage and the voltage across the resistor is practically in quadrature and therefore is proportional to its derivative.

Integrator circuit
- Here the resistance R1 is dominant impedance over the impedance of capacitor i.e. R2>>1/ C2. - Therefore the voltage across R2 will be practically in phase to input voltage whereas the output voltage i.e. Voltage across C2 should be in quadrature to the current I2 and is proportional to the integration of the input.

 If these circuits are put together, where the o/p of the one becomes the input of the other, its is apparent that the output will be proportional to the input but will be considerably attenuated. If the angles are such that = , then the input and output voltages are in phase or directly antiphase. This occurs when RC=1/RC =1/(RCRC)^(1/2). For the frequencies greater than or less than this values the differentiator/integrator will produce more attenuation, or, viewed as a potential divider. Plotting the frequency response curve for this circuit the 3dB roll off frequencies are defined by =1/(RC) and =1/(RC).

Now the ratio of output to input of the R1C1 circuit is,

Now for the differentiator circuit the condition is 1/C>> R1. So the approximated expression is given by,

Using the condition for the integrator circuit i.e. R2>>1/ C2. the approximated expression becomes,

Similarly for the R2C2 circuit the ratio is,

The ratio of input to output of the combined circuit is

which is independent of frequency.

Example :R1= 50 (typical surge impedance of the cable to be used) C1=5pF (for minimum circuit loading) Then we have R1*C1=2.5x10^(-10) Thus =1/(RC) =4x10^(9) and therefore f1=640 MHz For a desired attenuation of 5000:1 , we have RC=5000RC= 1.25x10^(-6) =8x10^(5) and f2=0.13MHz. The point of maximum gain and zero phase error is given by =1/(RCRC)^(1/2)=5.66x10^(7) and f=9 MHz.

 The higher frequency limit is resulted from the desire to have the minimum loading of the test circuit, while the low frequency limit f2 resulted from desire to produce mild attenuation. Precaution must be taken to keep the input connection inductance low (capacitor C and leads) so that they will not resonate at frequencies within the pass band. For example assuming C1=5pF, resonance occurs for an input inductance L1 at r^2=1/L1C1. For systems with upper frequency limit of 100 MHz(=6.28x10^8 rad/s), r should be 2x10^9 or higher, so 4x10^18=1/L1C1 L1=0.05H This represents a very small loop inductance and points out the need of close coupling between probe and circuit.

Case studies in transient measurements

The following case studies are discussed, 1. Measuring the arc voltage of a high voltage fuse. 2. Measurement of current near current zero 3. Overvoltage control during Reactor switching 4. Measuring fast front transients in SF6

1. Measuring the arc voltage of a high voltage fuse Problem:- The current is high(tens to thousands of amperes) and the voltage across the open fuse can be high, once the fuse has blown, though the arc voltage itself modest. Some loop in the voltage measuring circuit is present that picks up the induced voltage as shown by shaded area in the fig. b above from the high magnitude, high frequency current that passes through the fuse as it blows. This can be comparable or more than arc voltage.

 The problem of induced voltage pick up is solved by first making a test with the fuse replaced by a slug, a copper rod with very low resistance. The voltage then measured was essentially the induced voltage. It was recorded digitally and stored. The test setup was then made and the fuse was blown and the voltage was recorded digitally. The presence of arc voltage opposes the flow of current thereby reducing the current to some extent. Compensation for this is achieved by increasing the charging voltage to the capacitors. When comparable current is obtained, the voltage of the slug test is subtracted from the voltage obtained in the fuse test and result is shown on the oscilloscope.

Raw current and voltage data

Voltage from slug test

Deduced current and voltages Fig. A - fig. B. Both the arc voltage and current are in phase

Arc resistance ratio of arc voltage to arc current at sequential instants.

2. Measurement of current near current zero

Background: - Success or failure to interrupt the arc depends on the events that occur in the interrupting chamber(s) of the breaker in a time very close around the current zero. - To know the precise current and voltage at this time is necessary in design of the circuit breaker

 Problem - The peak of the currents may exceed several 100kA, but the area of interest is the last tens of amperes immediately prior to current zero and the current that flows after current zero driven by the TRV. - This current is to be measured. Moreover, the post arc current contains a displacement component because of local stray capacitance which must be extracted from the measured current to reveal the original value of the conduction current flowing in the plasma.

-The current from the source passes through the test breaker but not through the co-axial shunt S1 which is by passed by the vacuum interrupter(VI) -As the current approaches zero and values that S1 can safely handle VI opens and its arc voltage commutates the current into S1. -The transfer of the current is rapid being limited only by the loop inductance between S1 and VI.

 The voltage across S1 is now sent to the recording oscilloscope through a fibre optic link. In a successful experiment where the TB interrupts, S2 continues to sense the current in the post arc period. If the TB fails to interrupt the current, a fresh half cycle of power current is initiated. The diodes does not allows the voltage across the shunt to exceed the diode forward voltage which is safe for the shunt. However the diodes need to withstand higher voltages. The test is concluded by closing of the fast acting switch.(FCS)

Fig.a Raw current Data

Fig.b Final traces of voltage and Conduction current (after compensation for displacement current).

Fig.c decay of plasma Conductivity after current zero

References
1. Electrical Transients in Power system 2nd edition by Allan Greenwood. 2. H.W. Lord, High frequency Transient Voltage Measuring techniques, Trans. IEEE(Communications and Electronics), Vol. 82(1963).