Creating Coordination Curves with Excel Pgina 1 de 1

Creating Coordination Curves with Excel

Wednesday, 19 November 2008 20:14 | Print |

As electrical engineers, doing protective devices coordination is always a part of our tasks. You may say that I could
always use ETAP or EDSA or SKM Power Tools to do the job.

If your company has the money to buy all these software, then you are right. The most important thing however is, do you
know how to use the sophisticated power system analysis software.

At the end of this tutorial, the electrical engineer will be able to create coordination graphs for any particular application.
This tutorial also aims to provide tips during the process.

The requirements of this tutorial are the following

You have MS Excel - at least MS Excel 2003 - lower versions may do as well.
You know how to use MS Excel
You know how to create graphs.

This is a sample of coordination curve we shall be doing on the next part of the tutorial.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel II Pgina 1 de 2

Time-Current Curves with Excel II

Thursday, 20 November 2008 03:53 | Print |

In this part of the tutorial, we shall be able to produce a Normal Inverse time-current curve. Given the values below, we
will be plotting the values on an XY Scatter graph with data points connected without markers.

Normal Inverse Curve 400A

Setting
I (A) t (s)

600 2.75
800 1.60
1200 1.01
1600 0.80
1600 0.80
1600 0.14
4800 0.14
4800 0.10

Try plotting the values and I presume that you will be getting a graph similar to Figure 1.

Figure 1

To plot a graph similar to Figure 2, the technique is to chunk the data into separate data series.

Data Series 1
I (A) t (s)

600 2.75
800 1.60
1200 1.01
1600 0.80
Data Series 2
I (A) t (s)

1600 0.80
1600 0.14
Data Series 3
I (A) t (s)

1600 0.14
4800 0.14

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Time-Current Curves with Excel II Pgina 2 de 2

Data Series 4
I (A) t (s)

4800 0.14
4800 0.10

Figure 2

As I have said in the first part of this tutorial, I presume that you know how to use MS Excel. In the next part, we shall be
learning about how to calculate curves for normal inverse, very inverse, extreme inverse and long time inverse.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 1 de 6

Time-Current Curves with Excel III

Saturday, 22 November 2008 23:27 | Print |

In this tutorial, we shall be able to create Normal Inverse curves from the formula given below (IEC). This formula has
been used in so many coordination studies world wide. You can actually use it to coordinate your protection settings with
your power supplier. Normally the time setting for the network protection will be provided by the power supplier. We shall
be discussing this on the next tutorial.

Time-Current Formula
where

k = time, s
, = constants, see table below
I = Input Current
IO = Pickup setting

The curve constants for the different response curves are as follows.

Curve Constants

Normal Inverse (Type A) 0.02 0.14

Very Inverse (Type B) 1.00 13.5
Extremely Inverse (Type C) 2.00 80.0
Long Time Inverse 1.00 120

Using the formula above, the resulting values will be the following table. You could copy the whole table and paste it into
your worksheet or create the values yourself using the above formula. Remember that this curve is for Normal Inverse
curve.

500 A CT Rating (Normal Inverse)

I/IO I (A) 0.05 0.10 0.20 0.25 0.30 0.40 0.50 0.60 0.70 0.80 0.90 1.00

Time, s
1.5 750 0.86 1.72 3.44 4.30 5.16 6.88 8.60 10.32 12.04 13.76 15.47 17.19
2.0 1000 0.50 1.00 2.01 2.51 3.01 4.01 5.01 6.02 7.02 8.02 9.03 10.03
3.0 1500 0.32 0.63 1.26 1.58 1.89 2.52 3.15 3.78 4.41 5.04 5.67 6.30
4.0 2000 0.25 0.50 1.00 1.24 1.49 1.99 2.49 2.99 3.49 3.98 4.48 4.98
5.0 2500 0.21 0.43 0.86 1.07 1.28 1.71 2.14 2.57 3.00 3.42 3.85 4.28
6.0 3000 0.19 0.38 0.77 0.96 1.15 1.53 1.92 2.30 2.69 3.07 3.45 3.84
7.0 3500 0.18 0.35 0.71 0.88 1.06 1.41 1.76 2.12 2.47 2.82 3.17 3.53
8.0 4000 0.16 0.33 0.66 0.82 0.99 1.32 1.65 1.98 2.31 2.64 2.97 3.30
9.0 4500 0.16 0.31 0.62 0.78 0.93 1.25 1.56 1.87 2.18 2.49 2.80 3.12
10 5000 0.15 0.30 0.59 0.74 0.89 1.19 1.49 1.78 2.08 2.38 2.67 2.97
20 10000 0.11 0.23 0.45 0.57 0.68 0.91 1.13 1.36 1.59 1.81 2.04 2.27

With the values above, We shall be using the 2003 version of Excel to draw the chart. If you have 2007 version, it is not a
problem, the steps would just be different but the resulting graph will still be the same.

Step 1
Select the cell range as shown.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 2 de 6

Note: Do not include the I/IO, else you will be getting a different graph profile.

Step 2
Start chart wizard and select XY (Scatter) with data points connected by smoothed lines without marker.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 3 de 6

Step 4
Type a title, make sure to put x-axis title as Current in amperes and y-axis values as time in seconds.

Step 5
Click the gridlines tab and tick all the major and minor gridlines for X and Y axis. Then click finish. If prompted about the

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 4 de 6

location of the graph, select it as an object in the worksheet.

Step 6
The resulting graph will be

Step 7
Double click on the Y-axis values, the format Y-axis window will pop-up. Select Logarithmic scale. and values as shown.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 5 de 6

Do similar for the X-axis.

Step 8
The resulting graph will be as follows. As you could see, the graph scale now are logarithmic.

Step 9
Try format the graph, putting some additional values, removing the chart background, etc. The final graph may look like

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Time-Current Curves with Excel III Pgina 6 de 6

this.

Next time

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Time-Current Curves with Excel IV Pgina 1 de 2

Time-Current Curves with Excel IV

Wednesday, 26 November 2008 03:57 | Print |

This is the final part of the tutorial creating for time-current current curves with Excel. We shall be able to attain a complete
relay coordination similar to this following curve.

To understand better the coordination curve, here are the parameters. Please note that values are referred to the primary
which is 11kV.

Utility Supply (0.2 time multiplier)

Voltage : 11kV
SC Capacity : 75MVA
Protection: 250A set @ 5I N
Supply Cable
Size : 35 mm2 PVC/PVC
Primary Circuit Breaker (0.16 time multiplier)
Rating : 160A
Setting 1 : 800A @ 5I N
Setting 2 : 1120A @ 7I N
Power Transformer
Rating: 2500 kVA, 11/0.415kV, 6.25%Z
Secondary Circuit Breaker (0.12 time multiplier)
Rating : 4000A (150A - referred to Primary)
Setting 1 : 604A @ 4I N
Setting 2 : 905A @ 6I N
Motor Cable
Size : 185 mm 2 PVC/PVC
Motor Circuit Breaker (0.1 time multiplier)
Rating : 800A (30A - referred to Primary)
Setting 1 : 483A @ 16I N
Setting 2 : 604A @ 20I N

The utility time multiplier is normally provided by the power provider. Then, we need to work below it else, our protection is
not time coordinated with the utility.

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Time-Current Curves with Excel IV Pgina 2 de 2

For the motor circuit breaker, we need to select a setting wherein the value protection will not trip during motor starting
which is ideally 6 time the full load motor current and it should still be tripping below the secondary circuit breaker setting.

You may have noticed that I have included the damaged curve of the cables. These are correctly selected because they
way above the protection setting of the utility.

This is the final part of the time-current curve with excel. If you have any queries, feel free to post a comment and we shall
discuss.

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