Adaptive undervoltage protection scheme for safety bus in nuclear power plants

Abstract

In the event of a short-circuit accident on a 4.16 kV non-safety bus, the voltage is temporarily lowered as backflow occurs on the safety bus. In such cases, the undervoltage relay of the safety bus shall not pick up the undervoltage so as not to interfere with the operation of the safety motors. The aim of this study is to develop an adaptive undervoltage protection scheme for the 4.16 kV safety bus considering the faults on the 13.8 kV and 4.16 kV non-safety buses connected to secondary windings of the three winding transformers, UAT and SAT. The result of this study will be the adaptive undervoltage protection scheme for the safety bus of nuclear power plants satisfying functional requirements of the safety related medium voltage motors. The adaptive undervoltage protection scheme can be implemented into an integrated digital protective relay to make user friendly and reliable protection scheme.

Keywords

• Undervoltage relay
• Short circuit fault
• Digital protective relay
• Adaptive undervoltage protection
• IEC 61850