Enhanced Transformer Overcurrent Protection via Oil Temperature Acceleration

Abstract

When a transformer is in a long-term heavy load operation state, the oil temperature reaches the alarm temperature; if a slight fault occurs inside the transformer, traditional inverse time current protection and other protections that react to phase current may not operate due to insufficient sensitivity or they may operate for too long. Based on this, this article proposes a new principle of accelerating inverse time overcurrent protection based on transformer oil temperature. The proposed method uses transformer oil temperature to accelerate the action time of traditional inverse-time overcurrent protection, then introduces the transformer oil temperature factor and acceleration index to optimize the inverse time characteristic curve, and establishes a mathematical model to optimize the adjustment for the complexity of adjustment of the protection action equation and the risk of mismatch of the protection after the acceleration of oil temperature. The existing theoretical analysis and simulation verification results show that the proposed new overcurrent protection scheme based on the transformer oil temperature acceleration inverse time can effectively improve the protection of the rapidity and sensitivity, providing a new research idea for the combination of non-electrical and electrical quantity protection.

Keywords

• minor transformer failure
• inverse-time overcurrent protection
• transformer oil temperature
• parameter optimization and setting