Relay protection monitoring, diagnostic and operation assessment system

Customer

Transmission grid company TSO with the following characteristics: 

• 146 000 km of high-voltage transmission lines
• 958 substations 220-750 kV
• 265 000 IEDs (relay protection device) installed

Project goals

• Providing remote monitoring and health diagnostic of relay protection & control devices for timely detection of malfunctions and notification about problems. 
• Maintenance RPC by their actual condition and reducing operating costs for excess work performed by the preventive maintenance. 
• Reducing the time of fault event analysis in electrical networks and identifying misoperation and settings errors in RPC operation.
  

Challenges

• Misoperation and failures of RPC due to undetected errors in the configuration, external and internal device malfunctions.  
  
• Identification the causes of RPC misoperation is possible mostly within the planned maintenance.
• Increasing operating costs for maintenance because of increased total number and variety of IEDs.
• Relay operation analysis and assessment based on manual analysis a lot of emergency information (measurements, oscillograms, logs file).
• Reduced reliability of power supply due to unplanned withdrawal of equipment for repair and maintenance.

Implementation

• Automatic data collection from IEDs & SCADA (IEC 104, IEC 61850, SMB) for remote monitoring. 
  
• Continuous monitoring and supervision technical conditions and in time detecting, relay protections problems and defects. 
  
• Regular checking change of relay settings and configuration and changed control switches position. 
  
• Fault event analysis in electrical grid: data collection, processing, detecting faulted power equipment, distance (for OHL) and phases, assessment of correct relay protection operations. 
  
• Assessment of correct or incorrect operations protection functions regarding faulted equipment: 
  
  • Using internal software algorithms for analysis operation main and backup protections 
    
  • Using results operations relay models when simulated fault in power grid model and comparison with factual operation. 
    
• Notification and reporting. 
  
• Automatic information interaction regarding data exchange on fault events analisys between TSO (owner) and power grid operator. 

Project effects