Coil current analysis method for predictive maintenance of circuit breakers

This paper presents a method for analyzing the operating performance of a circuit breaker through the trip/close coil current signature. A time-domain based approach is used to detect the critical points in the coil current, which can be used by an intelligent system, human, or machine, to assess and predict the health of the breaker. The proposed algorithm is computationally inexpensive and can be easily embedded in a low cost microprocessor. Experimental data were used to verify the robustness of the algorithm. The method provides a practical extremum detection technique in a noisy environment, which can be extended for other digital signal processing applications in computer science and biomedical engineering.