Enhanced Numerical Breaker Failure Protection

Breaker failure (BF) protection provides backup for circuit breakers (CBs) and associated control wiring. Traditionally, CBs are not duplicated, but monitored by BF relays when ordered to trip. Upon a failure of a breaker to interrupt the current, the BF relay opens adjacent breakers to isolate the problem. The total trip time under a BF condition is often tightly fit into the critical fault clearance time as determined by system stability. With narrow stability limits in today's power systems, coordination margins for the operation of BF functions are becoming scarce. This imposes a requirement for the fast reset time of BF protection. In its first part, this paper presents a novel algorithm for numerical current-based BF function with a fast 0.5-cycle reset time even under severe subsidence current. In the second part, the paper addressed the problem of fast and secure recognition of binary inputs for both BF initiation and BF detection based on the auxiliary breaker contacts. This novel algorithm works with analog representation of binary signals and provides security under induced transients, battery ground faults, and other interfering events.