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Busbar protection – a review

Conference Paper · July 2010

DOI: 10.1109/SIBIRCON.2010.5555158

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IEEE Region 8 SIBIRCON-2010, Irkutsk Listvyanka, Russia, July 11 — 15, 2010 755

Busbar Protection – A Review

Sundar Moni Mohan#, Saibal Chatterjee*
#
RANGANADI HYDRO ELECTRIC PLANT,
NEEPCO Ltd., Yazali, Arunachal Pradesh, INDIA-791119, sundar_moni@yahoo.com
*
Department of Electrical Engineering,
NERIST, Nirjuli, Arunachal Pradesh, INDIA- 791109, saibalda@ieee.org

Abstract— Busbars, being one of the most critical
components of a switchyard where all the power system
equipments are connected, needs an important attention
from protection and from reliability point of view. Any mal-
operation may lead to threat for system stability but instant
clearance is needed during a fault to avoid cascaded
tripping. Many protection schemes have been devised
starting from over-current protection to differential schemes
using numerical to microprocessor based analysis in recent
times. The paper reviews different aspects of busbar
protection schemes and the recent trends of protection and
their advantages including steps taken to overcome the
problems of CT saturation and ratio mismatch of CT
secondary.
protection and blocking logic are used to give cost
effective and reliable result. This can also provide
discriminative phase and earth fault protection. The logic
can be described as when there is a through fault in any
feeder, it will block the incomer to operate but when there
is a busbar fault, the incomer breaker will operate. A short
time delay is applied to the incomer breaker to receive a
blocking signal from the feeder relay. For non-directional
relay greater than 40 ms setting is found satisfactory and
more than 60 ms for directional relay [1]. This delay takes
into account CT saturation.

Keywords— Busbar protection, CT saturation, Ratio

mismatch of CT secondary. Works on busbar protection,
Numerical relay, wavelet packet transform.

I. INTRODUCTION
A bus is one of the most critical system elements.
It is the connecting point of a variety of elements and a
number of transmission lines and any incorrect operation
would cause the loss of all of these elements. Protection
of busbars demands high speed reliability and stability.
Failure-to-trip on an internal fault, as well as false tripping
of a busbar during service, or in case of an external fault,
can both have disastrous effect on the stability of the
power system, and may even cause complete blackout of
the system. So, while designing a busbar protection
scheme, precision and reliability is the most important
factors to be incorporated. It was a very old practice in
small substations to provide over-current relays to work
for the protection of the busbar and no separate relays
were used for the purpose as this was not found to be cost
effective. But, with the increase in substation equipments
and feeders complexity increases and hence, it was felt
necessary to go for it. For indoor type substations, frame
leakage protection was used. It was quite popular in small
installations but is found to be prone to mal-operation [1].
Back-up over-current protection was used for busbar
protection but which results in total loss of load and very
long clearance time for a fault. With the advent of
technology, researchers have made remarkable progress in
the development of numerical as well as microprocessor
based relays as recent development [2].
II. BLOCKING LOGIC IN O/C RELAY
After limitations experienced with the use of
back up over-current relays, dedicated busbar protection
using numerical over-current relays with instantaneous
Fig. 1. Blocking Scheme
For sectionalized busbars, two settings are to be
incorporated where the highest setting will trip the section
or coupler breaker and after a time delay if the fault
current still persist, the sections will monitor individually
and isolate the faulty part. The scheme got an inherent
advantage that whenever there is failure of relay of the
outgoing feeder, the busbar scheme will operate within a
short period of time instead of delayed operation of
incomer backup over current protection.
III. NUMERICAL RELAY
Prior to moving to recent microprocessor based
programmable relays, numerical relay technology has
shown improved performance to its static counterpart and
thereby improving power system operation. R. Houghs
and E. Legrand of ALSTOM T&D, France, in their paper
describes two algorithms suitable in design of numerical
relays, statistical compensation of errors relating to
sensors and the detection algorithm of saturation of
magnetic sensors [3]. In the saturation detection algorithm,
they propose a transformer model, which will generate a
signal as predicted from the actual as the latter exceeds
the linear zone of magnetic characteristic and gets

978-1-4244-7626-8/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

756 IEEE Region 8 SIBIRCON-2010, Irkutsk Listvyanka, Russia, July 11 — 15, 2010
saturated. The algorithm will measure the variation
between real signal received from the transformer and the
model and modifies the generated signal until the
variation is cancelled. Thereby, this avoids the condition
of CT saturation during high through fault current.
Simulated result of both phase and magnitude
compensation values for a substation is presented which
shows satisfactory result for ratio mismatch problem in
CT secondary. The values calculated are specific to a
particular arrangement and for a typical substation
topology.
IV. DISTRIBUTED BUSBAR PROTECTION
In [4], a numerical distributed busbar protection
scheme is described in which the whole system is divided
into a no. of protection units each of which is installed on
one connected circuit of the busbar. All units are
connected via communication network and tripping
decision can be initiated comprising the data of all the
units. Fig. 2 shows the basic architecture of the distributed
bus protection system.
Fig. 2. Architecture of the Distributed Bus Protection
Fig. 3. Architecture of the distributed busbar
A decentralized busbar protection scheme is
described in [5] using individual Bay Units (BU)
connected to Central Unit (CU) through fibre optic LAN.
The sampling rate of the current and status data is 600 Hz
and sent to CU. The communication speed is 2.5 Mbps
and optical fibre cable is used to avoid any electrical
interference. The BU samples the local current at 7.5
electrical degrees and the CU processes any fault signal
sends a trip command through a separate optical fibre
cable. This also takes care of CT saturation by generating
block signal for a high through fault. To increase the
reliability of BU, CU and data communication network
CU continuously supervises the whole system by
automatic monitoring software.
Fig. 4. System Configuration for Decentralized Busbar Protection Relay
V. MICROPPROPCESSOR BASED RELAY
These are the recently developed programmable relays
which provide enormous flexibility in operation. In [6],
such type of relay is described which differentiate
between faults internal and external to busbar protection
zone. The analysing technique is based on concept of
symmetrical components. Relays installed at each
connected location of the busbar will calculate any
incremental impedance using pre fault and post fault
samples. This is termed as ‘Delta Impedance’. The plot of
these impedances in R-X diagram shows that for both
positive and negative sequence currents, all the
incremental relay impedance will lie in the third quadrant
for an internal fault and at least one relay will refer to first
quadrant in case of an external fault. These characteristics
are shown in Fig. 5 for internal and external faults.
Fig. 5. Fault-detection Characteristics
a. Internal fault
b. External fault
The system is found stable during CT saturation and
ratio mismatch. They claim generation of trip decision
with operating time of 9.0 to 13.5 ms.
VI. USE OF WAVELET ANALYSIS
With the advent of modern technology, new
powerful signal analyzing technologies are developed
which are used to analyze the fault signals and thereby
yielding time efficient results. Wavelet Transform
Analysis, one of the most powerful analyzing tools is used
in busbar fault analysis. This can detect a busbar fault
very rapidly and can be utilized to busbar protection relay
to clear a fault within a few ms by generating trip
command besides working reliably and free from
IEEE Region 8 SIBIRCON-2010, Irkutsk Listvyanka, Russia, July 11 — 15, 2010 757

influence due to CT saturation and ratio mismatch of CT differential current Id. Hence the detail coefficients appear
secondary. M. E. Mohammed, in his paper describes a in both the windows simultaneously as shown in Figure 6.
novel Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) based differential When Fault indexes of these two signals exceed their
busbar protection scheme [7]. The proposed technique is respective thresholds a trip signal is given to all circuit
based on a feature signal extracted from the original breakers.
current value using the WPT method. The proposed
technique uses the differential-relay principle for the
extracted signals rather than the current values. The
results of feature extraction from wavelet coefficients
corresponding to the line currents are computed at a
certain frequency band (level-3, packet 4 and d2 wavelet
function). According to the differential-relay principle, the
differential-coefficient signal SDC(k) is computed as : -

m
SDC (k) = ∑ Q 73 (k) L ---------- (1)
L =1
where m indicates the total number of lines
connected to the bus, k is the most recent sample after Fig. 6. Variation of dl -coefficients for Internal Fault.
fault occurrence. SDC(k) represents the instantaneous sum
The variations of Fault Indexes Ifd and Ifsl of current
of the wavelet coefficients decomposed from the original
signals Id and Is, are presented along with their threshold
current signals using the WPT.
values in Figures 7 & 8 for a 3-phase bus bar fault for
The accumulated value of the constituent parts of
different fault incidence angles.
the SDC can represent the energy level of the SDC in the
frequency band as
trip(k) = trip(k – 1) + SDC(k) .. (2)

The criterion for the protection relay to initiate a

trip signal is such that trip(k) must stay above a threshold
level continuously for a number of samples (three samples
after fault inception). The principle and application of the
wavelet-packet-transform-based differential busbar
protection as discussed in the paper gives several features
like sensitive to the fault current during CT saturation. Fig. 7. Variation of fault Indexes of three phase differential currents for a
The technique is stable during CT saturation and is not 3-phase busbar fault.
affected by CT error and ratio mismatch. The feature
extraction with wavelet packet transform can be
implemented in real time since wavelet-packet transform
requires only a small amount of computation. In another
paper, Shaik Abdul Gafoor and P.V. Ramana Rao use
Wavelet Transform analysis to differentiate internal faults
from external one by detail decomposition of differential
current [8]. The time shift in transients between the
differential and source currents is used to discriminate the
Fig. 8. Variation of fault Indexes of three phase source currents for a 3-
faults. They have analysed a system with four generators phase busbar fault.
are connected to two 220KV busbar sections. The
current signals of 110 MW Source-I CT (Is,) and the For an external fault like a feeder fault or fault in
differential current (Id ) obtained were sampled at a a zone beyond its protection zone (called as Zone-2), the
frequency of 5 kHz. The fault indexes Ifsl and lfd of the differential current should be zero. But with the CT facing
source current Is, and differential current lfd are defined as: the fault current alone during an external fault, its gets
I fs1 = MAX {ABS[d1_Is1 ]} saturated and hence the differential current fault index Ifd
------- (3)
I fd = MAX {ABS[d1_Id ]}
to reach its threshold. The variation of Fault Index Ifd of
differential current Id for feeder fault and Zone-2 fault is
shown in Figures 9 and 10 respectively for various
where, [dl_Ils] and [dl_Id ] are dl - coefficients of incidence angles.
current signals Is, and Id respectively obtained over a As the components connected to busbar i.e.
window length. Fault Indexes Ifsl and lfd are compared generators, transmission lines etc. are highly inductive in
with their Threshold values Th_Is1, and Th_Id respectively nature, the differential current cannot reach its saturation
to detect the fault. In the event of an internal fault, there level instantaneously. Hence the change in differential
will be a sudden change in the source current Is, and current Id appears with a delay compared to change in
758 IEEE Region 8 SIBIRCON-2010, Irkutsk Listvyanka, Russia, July 11 — 15, 2010

source current Is. This leads to a time shift in the instants
where the individual Fault Indexes Ifsl and lfd reach their
thresholds. These are shown in Figures 11 & 12 for a
feeder and Zone – 2 faults respectively. This shift in time
will detect it as out of zone fault and will not generate any
trip signal.
basis function are applied on the DIFF and SUM signals.
A comparison of the CWT of DIFF and CWT of SUM
values computed by the relay distinguishes the fault as
being inside or outside the protection zone of the busbar.
For a bus fault, the CWT of DIFF is greater than the
restraining factor (can be termed as R) times the CWT of
SUM value. The relay will calculate the values
continuously and will distinguish the fault inside the bus
zone when the calculated sample goes lower than some
negative threshold value. On the other hand, if it goes
higher than a positive threshold value, outside the bus
zone fault is identified.

Fig. 9. Variation in Ifd of three phases currents for feeder fault with fault
incidence angle.

Fig. 12. Time shift in windows for Zone-2 fault

Fig. 10. Variation in Ifd of three phases currents for Zone-2 fault with
fault incidence angle.
VII. CONCLUSIONS

From the static relays to recently developed

microprocessor based programmable relays, substantial
technological development had been achieved for relays.
In busbar protection type relays, the most important point
is the selectivity and faster clearance of fault [10]. Besides
that, immunity to problems due to CT saturation and ratio
mismatch are also the desired characteristics. In
comparison to others, it has been observed that there are
few algorithms available for protecting busbars. Out of
these, the latest works under research are to analyse fault
signals using the powerful analysis tool - wavelet
transform analysis. Different new features can be obtained
using this analysis tool. The simulation results of different
techniques show fast, reliable and stable operation under
various conditions.
Considering the principle of fault detection
Fig. 11. Time shift in windows for feeder fault. procedures adopted in different methods discussed above,
it is observed that the speed and selectivity of the fault can
Since the proposed method is based on the be obtained by improving the signal analysis methodology
changes in differential current, its operation is not affected of the differential current. The reliability can also be
by the problems associated with the conventional busbar ensured rather than using ‘main’ and ‘check’ type
protection such as CT errors and ratio-mismatches. principle with independent dual circuits as popularly used
Another work of M. M. Eissa, using Continuous Wavelet [10]. Wavelet Transform based analysis of differential
Transform (CWT) is studied which uses Morlet wavelets current signal can be used in practical field to obtain
as the wavelet basis function [9]. The faults generated reliable high speed fault detection and discrimination with
transients are extracted from the differential current (DIFF) the use of dedicated microprocessors. There is novel
as the operating quantity and the sum of the current prospect to design relays incorporated with wavelet
magnitudes (SUM) as the stabilizing signal. The transform analysis in this area for faster clearance of
magnitude values of wavelet transform based on Morlet
 IEEE Region 8 SIBIRCON-2010, Irkutsk Listvyanka, Russia, July 11 — 15, 2010
faults. On successful design, this type of relays can also
be used in other differential protection applications.
REFERENCES
[1] Brewis K., Hearfield K., Chapman K., “Theory and Practical
Performance of Interlocked Over-current Busbar Zone Protection
in Distribution Substations”, Developments in Power System
Protection, Conference Publication No.479, IEE 2001.
[2] Kasztenny Bogdan, Jorge Cardenas, “New Phase-Segregated
Digital Busbar Protection Solutions”, GE Multilin.
[3] Hughes R., Legrand E., “Numerical Busbar Protection Benefits of
Numerical Technology in Electrical Substation”, Developments in
Power System Protection, Conference Publication No.479, IEE
2001.
[4] Wang Gang, Li Haibng, Li Xiaohua, “A New Numerical
Distributed Busbar Protection”, The Institution of Electrical
Engineers, 2004.
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[5] Watanabe H., Shuto I., Igarashi K., Beaumont P., Okuno K., “An
Enhanced Decentralized Numerical Busbar Protection Relay
Utilising Instantaneous Current Values from High Speed
Sampling”, Developments in Power System Protection,
Conference Publication No.479, IEE 2001.
[6] Gill H. S., Sidhu T.S., Sachdev M.S., “Microprocessor-based
Busbar Protection Scheme”, IEE Proceedings- Generation
Transmission and Distribution, IEE 2000.
[7] Mohammed M.E., “High-Speed Differential Busbar Protection
using Wavelet-Packet Transform”, IEE Proceedings - Generation
Transmission and Distribution, 2005.
[8] Gafoor Shaik Abdul, Rao P.V. Ramana, “A New Wavelet
Transform Based Busbar Protection”, IEEE Region 10
Conference, 2006.
[9] Eissa M.M., “A Novel Wavelet Approach to Busbar Protection
During CT Saturation and Ratio-Mismatch”, Electric Power
Systems Research, 2004.
[10] ALSTOM, “Network Protection and Automation Guide”,
ALSTOM, 2002.