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PROTECTION
INTRODUCTION
A generator is the heart of an electrical power system, as it converts mechanical energy into its electrical equivalent, which is further distributed at various voltages. It therefore requires a prime mover to develop this mechanical power and this can take the form of steam, gas or water turbines or diesel engines.
TURBINES
Steam turbines are used virtually exclusively by the main power utilities, whereas in industry three main types of prime movers are in use: 1. Steam turbines: Normally found where waste steam is available and used for base load or standby. 2. Gas turbines: Generally used for peak-lopping or mobile applications. 3. Diesel engines: Most popular as standby plant.
It will be appreciated that a modern large generating unit is a complex system, comprising of number of components: Stator winding with associated main and unit transformers Rotor with its field winding and exciters Turbine with its boiler, condenser, auxiliary fans and pumps.
B. System disturbances and operational hazards 1. Loss of prime-mover; generator motoring 2. Over excitation: volts or hertz protection 3. Inadvertent energization : non synchronized connection 4. Unbalanced currents: negative sequence ; breaker pole flashover 5. Thermal overload
GENERATOR PROTECTION
The following are the main protection schemes adopted for generator. 1. Generator Differential Protection 2. Generator & Transformer Differential Protection 3. Loss of Field or Loss of Excitation Protection 4. Negative Sequence or Current Unbalance Protection 5. Over Fluxing or Over Excitation Protection 6. Over Current Protection 7. Stator Earth Fault Protection 8. Rotor Earth Fault Protection (64R)
GENERATOR PROTECTION
9. Restricted Earth Fault Protection 10. Backup Impedance Protection 11. Low Forward Power Protection 12. Reverse Power Protection 13. Pole Slip Protection 14. Pole Discrepancy Protection 15. Local Breaker Back Protection 16. Bus Bar Protection 17. Over Frequency Protection 18. Under Frequency Protection 19. Over Voltage Protection
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Earth fault protection can be applied by using a transformer and adopting a relay to measure the earthing transformer secondary current or by connecting a voltage-operated relay in parallel with the loading resistor
OVERLOAD PROTECTION
Generators are very rarely troubled by overload, as the amount of power they can deliver is a function of the prime mover, which is being continuously monitored by its governors and regulator. Where overload protection is provided, it usually takes the form of a thermocouple or thermistor embedded in the stator winding. The rotor winding is checked by measuring the resistance of the field winding.
OVERVOLTAGE PROTECTION
Overvoltage can occur as either a high-speed transient or a sustained condition at system frequency. Power frequency over voltages are normally the result of: 1. Defective voltage regulator 2. Manual control error (sudden variation of load) 3. Sudden loss of load due to other circuit tripping.
OVERVOLTAGE PROTECTION
Overvoltage protection is therefore only applied to unattended automatic machines, at say a hydroelectric station. The normal setting adopted are quite high almost equal to 150% but with instantaneous operation
UNBALANCED LOADING
Any unbalanced condition can be broken down into positive, negative and zero sequence components. The positive component behaves similar to the balanced load. The zero components produce no main armature reaction. However, the negative component creates a reaction field, which rotates counter to the DC field, and hence produces a flux, which cuts the rotor at twice the rotational velocity. This induces double frequency currents in the field system and rotor body.
UNBALANCED LOADING
The resulting eddy currents are very large, so severe that excessive heating occurs, quickly heating the brass rotor slot wedges to the softening point where they are susceptible to being extruded under centrifugal force until they stand above the rotor surface, in danger of striking the stator iron It is therefore very important that negative phase sequence protection be installed, to protect against unbalanced loading and it consequences.
ROTOR FAULTS
The rotor has a DC supply fed onto its winding which sets up a standing flux. When this flux is rotated by the prime mover, it cuts the stator winding to induce current and voltage therein. This DC supply from the exciter need not be earthed
ROTOR FAULTS
If an earth fault occurs, no fault current will flow and the machine can continue to run indefinitely, however, one would be unaware of this condition. Danger then arises if a second earth fault occurs at another point in the winding, thereby shorting out portion of the winding. This causes the field current to increase and be diverted, burning out conductors.
ROTOR FAULTS
In addition, the fluxes become distorted resulting in unbalanced mechanical forces on the rotor causing violent vibrations, which may damage the bearings and even displace the rotor by an amount, which would cause it to foul the stator. It is therefore important that rotor earth fault protection be installed. This can be done in a variety of ways.
ROTOR EARTH FAULT PROTECTION METHODS Potentiometer method AC injection method DC injection method
POTENTIOMETER METHOD
The field winding is connected with a resistance having center tap. The tap point is connected to the earth through a sensitive relay R. An earth fault in the field winding produces a voltage across the relay.
POTENTIOMETER METHOD
AC INJECTION METHOD
This method requires an auxiliary supply, which is injected to the field circuit through a coupling capacitance. The capacitor prevents the chances of higher DC current passing through the transformer.
AC INJECTION METHOD
DC INJECTION METHOD
This method avoids the capacitance currents by rectifying the injection voltage adopted in the previous method. The auxiliary voltage is used to bias the field voltage to be negative with respect to the earth. An earth fault causes the fault current to flow through the DC power unit causing the sensitive relay to operate under fault conditions
DC INJECTION METHOD
REVERSE POWER
Reverse power protection is applicable when generators run in parallel, and to protect against the failure of the prime mover. Should this fail then, the generator would motor by taking power from the system and could aggravate the failure of the mechanical drive.
LOSS OF EXCITATION
If the rotor field system should fail for whatever reason, the generator would then operate as an induction generator, continuing to generate power determined by the load setting of the turbine governor.
It would be operating at a slip frequency and although there is no immediate danger to the set, heating will occur, as the machine will not have been designed to run continuously in such an asynchronous fashion.
LOSS OF EXCITATION
Some form of field failure detection is thus required, and on the larger machines, this is augmented by a mho-type impedance relay to detect this condition on the primary side.
LOSS OF SYNCHRONIZATION
A generator could lose synchronism with the power system because of a severe system fault disturbance, or operation at a high load with a leading power factor. This shock may cause the rotor to oscillate, with consequent variations of current, voltage and power factor.
LOSS OF SYNCHRONIZATION
Alternatively, trip the field switch to run the machine as an asynchronous generator, reduce the field excitation and load, then reclose the field switch to resynchronize smoothly.
FIELD SUPPRESSION
It is obvious that if a machine should develop a fault, the field should be suppressed as quickly as possible, otherwise the generator will continue to feed its own fault and increase the damage. Removing the motive power will not help in view of the large kinetic energy of the machine.
The power directional relay is connected to operate when real power flows into the generator. Typical relay sensitivities with microprocessor relays are as low as 1 mA, which may be required when a generator can operate with partial prime-mover input. The operating time can be approximately 2 sec.
Of course, not all protections are adopted for every generator since the cost of the installation decides the economics of protection required
It is one of the important protections to protect generator winding against internal faults such as phase-to-phase and three phase-to-ground faults. This type of fault is very serious because very large current can flow and produce large amounts of damage to the winding if it is allowed to persist. One set current transformers of the generator on neutral and phase side, is exclusively used for this protection.
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The differential protection can not detect turn-to-turn fault and phase to ground within one winding for high impedance neutral grounding generator such as ours. Upon the detection of a phase-to-phase fault in the winding, the unit is tripped with out time delay.
Typical differential (87) connections for the protection of wye- and delta connected generators: (a) wye-connected generator
Typical differential (87) connections for the protection of wyeand delta connected generators: delta-connected generator.
Ground (zero-sequence) differential protection for a generator using a directional groundover current relay.
CAPACITIVE COUPLING THROUGH TRANSFORMER BANKS FOR PRIMARY-SIDE GROUND FAULTS: (A) THREE-PHASE SYSTEM
DIAGRAM