A Methodology for Remote Sensing Inter-Turn Fault Events in Power System Air-Core Reactors, via Simulation of Magneto Quasi-Static Fields in 2D FDTD

Abstract

We present a numerical methodology to estimate the transient fault currents and to simulate the remote sensing of transient fault information embedded in the magnetic field emissions caused by inter-turn shorts in 60 Hz air-core reactors, thru a magneto quasi-static (MQS) field approximation in the method of Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) in 2-dimensional (2D) space. The MQS 2D FDTD fields of reactor in normal operation are scaled by correlation against an equivalent circuit model that is derived from application of basic physics principles to parameters of the 3D air-core reactor. The proposed multi-scale quasi-static modeling methodology, based on the reduced c modification, provides fine-feature access down to the single-wire level and can efficiently estimate the transient fault fields and currents due to turn-to-turn short in a reactor with core height in several meters, core diameter in meters, wire diameter in millimeters, and number of turns in the thousands, at 60 Hz; this is accomplished by using computational resources of a typical laptop computer within seconds or minutes, as opposed to days that would be otherwise required without the reduced c modification.

Keywords

• Air-core reactor
• inter-turn fault
• inter-winding fault
• magneto quasi-statics
• transient fault
• turn-to-turn fault