Probabilistic Indicators for Assessing Age- and Loading-Based Criticality of Transformers to Cascading Failure Events

The paper investigates the effect of a transformer unplanned outage on the failure probability of the remaining transformers in the network. The probability of consequential dependent failures of transformers might ultimately lead to a multiple or cascading failure. New probabilistic indicators based on the transformer's unavailability under outage conditions have been formulated for individual power transformers and transformer sites to help with this assessment. The effect of thermal stress of transformer on its unavailability due to the new loading condition is taken into account as well as the age and the original loading of the transformer. The Arrhenius-Weibull life-stress model was adopted for assessment of the transformer unavailability. The study identifies both transformers whose outage could initiate cascading failure and those that are the most vulnerable to consequential failure. The effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic indicators in identifying the most critical transformers for multiple failure events is demonstrated on a realistic transmission test system with 154 power transformers.