A new failure protection algorithm for circuit breakers using the power loss of switching arc incidents

Abstract

The principal function of circuit breakers (CBs) is to isolate a portion of the power network from the rest ofit in a timely manner following an opening command. Any failure in the opening operation of CBs, especially followinga fault condition, will almost certainly result in a catastrophic event. Therefore, the issue of failure detection of CBsis essential and has a vital role in power system protection. This paper presents a novel power-based algorithm forfailure detection of CBs. The power loss of CBs due to an arcing event increases as the arcing time gets longer. Thearcing time of CBs increases with defective operations originating from any failure or malfunction for different reasons.The proposed method uses the power difference between the input and output terminals of CBs to calculate the powerloss due to an arcing event, which can then be used to estimate the arcing energy. A trip signal is initiated wheneverthe estimated arcing energy for a single opening operation reaches a predefined trip level, which shows a failure in CBoperation. This predefined trip value is related to the integration of the maximum power capacity of the CB during anopening operation time. Computer simulation studies conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed techniquedemonstrate that the algorithm is capable of discriminating between normal and abnormal arcing energies and thusidentifying malfunctions or failures in the opening operations of CBs.