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When you think of a plant or industries, one of the things that you want to protect are your electrical equipment and circuits. In order to minimise the damages due to abnormal current and overvoltage, electrical equipment and circuits should be protected in a substation. The equipment that you install in a power electrical system has standardised ratings for short-time withstand current and short duration power frequency voltage.
What is the role of power transformer protection?
You need protection to ensure that the set withstand limits are never exceeded, hence the need for clearing the faults as soon as possible. Furthermore, the requirement of a system must be selective. Now, what does selectivity mean? It means that any fault must be cleared by the device of current interruption being the nearest to the fault, and it doesn’t matter even if the fault is detected by other protection that are associated with other interruption devices.
Let us explain this with an example, for a short circuit to occur on the secondary side of a power transformer, the circuit breaker that has been installed on the secondary must trip. And, the circuit breaker that was installed on the primary side must remain closed. Thus, for a transformer protected with MV fuses, the fuses must not blow.
There are usually two primary devices that can easily interrupt fault current, fuses, and circuit breakers:
- You need to make sure that circuit breakers must be associated with a protection relay having three vital functions:
- Detection of the fault
- Measurement of the currents
- Emission of a tripping order to the breaker
- The fuses blow under certain fault conditions.
Now let us have a look at the transformer protection systems based on their operation criteria
Below you will see different types of transformer protection systems based on their operation
Table 1
| Operation Criteria | Protection System | Failure Location (Internal/External) |
| When talking about current differences criteria | Differential protection | It is Internal/external protection |
| When talking about high current criteria | Overcurrent protection | Then External protection |
| When talking about gas evaluation criteria | Buchholz relay | Then Internal protection |
| When talking about high-temperature criteria | Thermal overload protection | Then Internal protection |
| When talking about zero-sequence current criteria | Ground fault protection | Then External protection |
| When talking about impedance criteria | Distance protection | Then External protection |
Let us move on to transformer protection types by failure conditions
If there are several protection systems, then this will help you detect different faulty conditions in the transformer.
Table number 2 talks about which failures can be detected with its corresponding protection system.
Table 2
| Transformer Faulty Conditions | Protection System |
| Going through overloading or overheating | Opt forThermal overload protection |
| Going through an external short circuit in the network | Opt for Overcurrent and distance protection |
| Going through transformer internal short circuit | Opt for Differential Relays, overcurrent and Buchholz relay |
| Going through transformer internal single phase short circuit or ground-fault | Opt for Single phase overcurrent, ground fault and tank ground-fault protection |
Conclusion
We are aware of the fact that transformers are slightly expensive, but they play an important role in power systems and protection schemes should be present in order to detect and solve any unprecedented condition in a jiffy. And, for that we have Schneider Electric India, we implement the best techniques like multiple winding differential, REF and thermal algorithms, and collect service data to aid the scheduling of preventive maintenance.
Related Blog: Exploring Power Transformer Protection for Power Systems: Failure Types and Differential Protection
