Integral Protection Methodology to Mitigate Incident Energy

This paper proposes a new integral methodology to overcome hidden failures and mitigate the electrical hazard due arc-flash events. This methodology overcomes the drawbacks of legacy protection functions due hidden failures. Also, considering the requirement to limit the maximum arc-flash hazard, a restriction has been implemented to coordinate the protection devices in the proposed methodology. The application results of the proposed methodology are shown on a steel manufacturer user showing the improvements by reducing the probably incident energy feasible due to arc-flash events and show how legacy protection functions would fail to operate in such scenario.