Teaching Protective Relaying Using a Portable Relay Training Laboratory

This paper presents an original portable protective relay training laboratory aimed at teaching power systems students protective relaying to make them “Ready-to-Go Engineers” for working in the power systems industry. The lab includes four modern microprocessor-based relays for protecting EHV transmission lines, substation power transformers, and distribution feeders. The lab assignments focused on developing protection settings, loading the relay configurations, and testing the protective relays by injecting both internal and external faults using a 3-phase power system simulator (relay test set). The lab was part of a larger one-semester protective relay class (60-hour duration) using the protection section of a popular power systems analysis textbook and was comprised of lectures, exams, and the protective relay lab assignments. This lab within a class provided knowledge and training of designing relay protection for these power system components. Overall, the students gained valuable hands-on experience in real-world applications.