Improvement in Arc Flash Protection Based on IEC 61850 Protocol

Reliability in power system protection and safety of the operating personnel are of paramount interest in protection system particularly when Arc Flash phenomenon is a burning issue in the industry at present. With the advancement in technology, it is possible to improve the protection and mitigate the Arc Flash issue leveraging on the digital Substation Automation System (SAS). Implementation of digital protection system promise to improve the performance and save the operating personnel during the catastrophic failure of a non-Arc contained high voltage switchboard. Implementation of a digital protection schemes in a HV substation leveraging on IEC 61850 could not only provide improved protection time but also provide optimized maintenance cost while conducting fault diagnostics. This paper analyses conventional methods of Arc Flash protection by conducting few tests at the Curtin University laboratory, Western Australia, using generic object oriented substation events (GOOSE) and sampled values (SV). The tests highlighted the improvement in SAS in cutting off power supply instantaneously during an Arc Flash event in a high voltage switchboard.