Assessing circuit breaker life cycle using condition-based data

How to make decisions to optimally allocate the resources by deciding when to perform maintenance on power apparatus is a critical issue, especially with present economic scenario in power industry. This paper proposes a new approach to assess the circuit breaker's life cycle or deterioration stages using its control circuit data. In this approach, the “classical” healthy, minor and major deterioration stages have been mathematically defined by setting up the limits of various performance indices. The model can be automatically updated as the new real-time condition-based data become available to assess the CB's operation performance using probability distributions. The methodology may also be used to quantify the effect of maintenance making use of the defined performance indices, which further helps in developing system-wide risk-based decision approaches for maintenance optimization. Case studies using field data recorded at different times during operations of circuit breaker are presented at the end.