73

AC ELECTRIFIED RAILWAYS - PROTECTION AND DISTANCE TO FAULT MEASUREMENT

A Millard, I A Taylor and G C Weller. GEC ALSTHOM T&D, UK
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the variety of infeed arrangements used to optimise the supply of power for ac electrified railways. These feeding arrangements and the increasing use of regenerative locomotive braking present unusual impedances to distance measuring elements and impedance measuring fault locators. The resultant optimisation of the relay impedance characteristic, over-current backup protection, and integral fault locator is discussed. Special considerations for low frequency 16.7Hz and 25Hz systems are examined Finally, the gathering and processing of data by the relay, for transmission to a central location. IS reviewed.

Distance from sub-station Fig 1. Impedance characteristic of simple feeding circuit

20 km

Booster Transformers

APPLICATIONS
To allow the reader to make a direct comparison for the impedance's seen for each feeding arrangement, the properties of the rails, feeder and trolley wires. are similar for each feeding arrangement In thti following figures, a rypical catenary impeaance of 0.169 + J0.612 [YKm. at 50Hz, has been chosen. Some abbreviations are also used II! the diagrams. These are (S/C Z) short-circuit impedance, (T) - contact, or troiley wire, (R) - the rails. and (NF) - negative return wire

Typically booster transformers are typically located every 3 to 5 km, lowering the impedance of the return path, by encouraging the current to flow through the negative return wire (NF) rather than the rails (R). The apparent impedance seen by the relay distance elements is shown in figure
L

Plain Feeders The relationship between the impedance and distance, as shown in figure 1, presents the simplest application of all, with a linear relationship between the impedance and distance. Settings are easily calculated, with very accurate distance to fault location using impedance measuring principles. When fault/load current returns by a negative return wire (NF),rather than the rails (R). the loop impedance is lowered.

Distance from sub-station

Fig 2.

20 km

Impedance characteristic of BT feeding circuit

Distance elements can be set to "see" through several transformers with no real application problems Distance to fault location using impedance principles IS more difficult with the booster transformer introducing a step in the apparent impedance For certain fault locations,

Electric Railways in a United Europe. 27-30 March 1995 Conference Publication No.405, 0 IEE 1995.

74
it will not always be possible for the fault locator to determine on which side of the booster transformer a fault is located.

El
E M

-75 ohms

Auto Transformers Distance elements can be set to "see" past the auto transformer locations, but now each fault is effectively double end fed, by the adjacent autotransformers. There is now a definite "fold round" impedance presented to the relay - see figure 3. There may be one, two, or three possible fault locations for some fault recorder readings.

o -50ohms

37.5 km 50 km Fig 4

75 km

100 km

Distance from Sub-station Impedance characteristic of static VAr compensator feeding circuit

Regenerative Braking
T-R SIC 2

regenerative braking applied at 50km

N ,
a , U

-300,ohms

Fig 3

20 km Distance from sub-station Impedance characteristic of AT feeding circuit

?
U

;j -200 ohms

,_..

0)

regenerative braking applied at relay I point

T-R SIC 2

Static VAr Compensators Static VAr Compensators (SVCs) have beeii edaluated for applications where there are very lcng catenaries, Dr L Hu and Dr R.E. Morrison (1). The SVC consists of a capacitor that is shunted by an inductor in series with a solid state witch. The control circuit maintains the catenary voltage profile under varying load conditions. This approach has advantages when supply infeeds are difficult to install and/or the traction load is high. Under fault conditions. the SVC behaves like a simple capacitor, with the shunt inductor open circuited by the control circuit. For the example in figure 4, two SVCs are located at 37.5km and 75km from the relayhnfeed location. Between the relay and the first SVC, the impedancddistance relationship is linear, but beyond the SVC, the impedance will then increase at a faster, non-linear rate. This will not present a problem to the operation of the relay distance elements because they can be set accordingly, but it will introduce distance-to-fault errors beyond the first and second SVC.

U .

a , -a ,

100 ohms,.,,'
,,'

, , , , , ' '

,
I
I
I

normal T-R SIC Z

/

I,,,,'Fig 5

25 km

50 km

75 km

Distance from Sub-station Impedance characteristic of feeding circuit with regenerative braking

For simplicity, the effects of regenerative braking are examined on the same plain catenary described in figure 1, Mr D. McQuillan (2). Two locomotive positions are considered in figure 5, one close to the distance relay location, and a second at a distance of 50km. This type of braking impedance appears to the relay as a slowly moving source, feeding power back into the catenary. The potential load encroachment caused by the re-generative braking is shown on the relay characteristic X/R diagram, figure 6. Re-generation is blocked within the locomotive, if the catenary potential falls below 60% of the nominal rating (15kv on a nominal 25kv system).

The fine solid line, in figure 5, represents the apparent impedance for solid faults progressing down the catenary, with no re-generative braking taking place within the section. When the close

75
LIP locomotive brakes, it feeds power into any subsequent fault beyond the locomotive, raising the impedance "seen" by the relay. See the fine chain dotted line in figure 5. With strong regeneration, this impedance may remain high at the locomotive location, making it impossible for the relay to detect the fault and trip the circuit breakers to clear the fault until the locomotive stops braking.

When the locomotive is located further away, at 50km in this example, the apparent fault impedance for remote faults is even higher; see the thick chain dotted line. Theoretically, the relay would be unable to see any fault beyond the locomotive, but the resulting voltage drop along the intervening section of catenary will cause the locomotive voltage to fall rapidly. When this voltage falls to less than 60%, the locomotive reqeneration is blocked, allowing the relay to <subsequently"see" the fault.
it may be concluded that re-generative braking

To provide the best coverage of medium, to high resistance faults, and accommodate the maximum permissible load encroachment due to traction load and regenerative braking, the relay characteristic has been made very adaptable. Figure 6 shows an example where the settings have been selected for a particular line to optimise the fault coverage, by shaping it around the load characteristic. Instantaneous Zone 1 and time delayed Zone 2 are directional and will operate for faults in the forward direction. The Zone 3 characteristic has an independently adjustable forward and reverse setting. Each Zone can have a different forward and reverse resistive setting. To maximise coverage and sensitivity, the characteristic angle of the relay can be set up to *loo away from the catenary angle, without introducing any appreciable slowing down of the relay for solid, on angle faults.
Also on this diagram, a remote, forward fault is considered, containing a slightly resistive component. A locomotive, fitted with regenerative braking, brakes between the relay and fault location, resulting in the apparent fault impedance rising and swinging into the second quadrant of the WR diagram. The shape and settings available on the Zone 3 relay characteristics for this example ensure time delayed, impedance backup tripping. is still possible. For the majority of Zone 1 faults, the relay will operate in under 1.5 cycles, but to cater for the possibility that some sections of line may have auto-reclose and/or will require high speed operation of both the local and remote breaker, then a Zone 1 extension scheme and a Zone 1 permissive undereach scheme are provided. The Zone 1 extension scheme can be applied when no signalling channel is available, but where both the local and iremote breaker must be tripped instantaneously Zone 1 can be set tci 120% of the protected track. The permissive undereach scheme requires a signalling channel and providing the undereaching Zone 1 comparator elements are set to "overlap" from each end, fast clearance of faults along the whole of the protected track section will be effected.

presents difficulties to impedance measuring ielays and fault locators. It would be an advantage if the locomotive manufacturers also xovided over-current blocking control on the -egenerative braking, in addition to the existing amder-voltage. Then, for the majority of system sault conditions, the much lower impedance seen" by the locornotive. when braking 8:ommences. would immediately switch the ocomotive over to conventional braking.

THE RELAY CHARACTERISTIC

OVER-CURRENT ELEMENTS
Fig 6

Settings ot Zone 1 , Zone 2 and Zone 3 including regenerative braking

For the 167Hz railway systerns to be found in parts of Europe and the 25Hz systerns in the North East Corridor of the USA. there are times

76
when the operating time of the Zone 1 distance element may be too long. To minimise possible catenary damage for close up faults and strong generation, a high speed overcurrent element is provided to supplement the distance protection. This consists of an instantaneous, non-directional element, with a setting range of 0.1 to 20111, and an operating time of 0.4 cycle. The buffers are transformed via a Fast Fourier Transform to produce the pre-fault and post-fault phase and amplitude. The pre-fault and post-fault values are used to determine the values of the superimposed voltage and current necessary to alleviate errors due to locomotive loading. The distance to fault is determined via a single ended algorithm based on a 2 machine equivalent circuit of the faulted system, shown in figure 7. A situation that could occur when using auto transformer feeding.

In addition, there are two further backup overcurrent elements1) A definite time delayed, non directional overcurrent backup element, with a setting range of 0.1 to 201n. and a time delay of 0.1 to 9.98 sec. 2) An inverse time, non-directional over-current backup element with eight standard curves, four IEC and four USA with three definite time settings.

For the majority of the electrified railway feeding arrangements there will be no backfeed for reverse faults. This overcomes the need to directionalise the over-current elements, with the only criterion being to consider the maximum load current. On auto-transformer fed catenaries, which are effectively double end fed, the instantaneous over-current element must consider the maximum current that could be delivered into a close up reverse fault, and be set to only pickup for larger currents. The maximum current that could be fed into a reverse fault, as opposed to a forward fault is determined solely by the intervening section of feeder in front of the relay. This assumption is based on the source impedance and short circuit impedances of each booster tiransformer being Pie same.

Fig 7. Two machine equivalent circuit From this diagram:-

Vp = mZrlp + IfW
By taking the instantaneous values at the point where the fault current (If) is zero the equation can be simplified to:

FAULT LOCATION
The Optimho fault locator uses an impedance measuring method to provide the fault location feature. A load metering capability is provided. l h e voltage and current signal's for the fault locator are converted into digital values and sampled at 40 times per cycle. Acquired data is stored in one of 5 sample buffers pending processing upon a fault conditioii. these buffers enable 4 successive faults to be stored pending Drocessing. If more than 4 fault:< occur within a 20 second period the fault locator will ignore faults until a buffer is available

Since Vp and Ip are measured at the relay point the distance to the fault can be calculated after measuring the angle of the fault current. The metering capability of the fault locator also allows continuous monitoring of voltage, current, Watts and VArs under healthy conditions. The advantage of applying a fault locator to a railway system is the rapid location of faults and with plain feeders the location of the fault IS determined with a high degree of accuracy. There is some loss of advantage when applied to some of the feeding arrangements considered previously, where a non linear impedance can result in some loss of accuracy in determining the fault location.

77

COMMUNlCATlONS
The advantage of communication within the power system protection field has demonstrated itself in recent years. Today dedicated software packages have been developed to communicate both fault records and setting information, using standard telephone networks, to command and interrogate remote relays.

device is accessed by its relevant software through a coded switch on site. The advantage of applying communication systems to protection schemes is the ability to rapidly update the relays settings without the need to visit the site. The increased use of combined fault location and distance protection, facilitates the rapid collection and analysis of fault records and operating data via the communication link. This information enables rapid fault analysis and rectification.

Point to Point Communication Initially, communication options were only available on event recorders to provide means ot extraction for the relatively large quantities of data. The distance protection used on the railway system has the ability to be interrogated and commanded remotely. This data transfer can be c:arried out via a direct link to a PC, or over greater distances through the existing telephone network via modems. This ability to view the operation of the relay allows the monitoring and c:.ollection of the data to be performed at a central location without the need to visit tht? relays. The distance protection iises a standard 95232 interface, with the appropriate modems or personal computers. In its standard format the KS232 interface is not electrically isolated and as shown in figure 8 an additional form of isolation IS required.

~ O D E M RS232

APPLICATION SOFTWARE

/ F A u L T t G ; ? _ i RECORDER
A

I _ _ _ _ .

Fig 9. RS232 multiple serial links

CONCLUSIONS

Optical Isolation
I

~9Application
software
./------/I

-~il

1 G7/
I

RS232

I RS232

Fig 8. RS232 Point to Point Communication The advantage of using the RS232 system is that it is a world recognised standard and is supported by a wide range of communicatioiis equipment. The application software can access individually a wide number of relays over a telephone network. To access different products at a c m m o n site requires the use o f dedicated application software since each communication package requires detailed knowledge of the product t o set the relay. In figure 9 a rnultiple application arrangement is shown. Here each

This paper has examined some of the difficulties of applying fault detection and measurement for the wide range of electric locomotive feeding arrangements found in Europe and throughout the world. It has also addressed the problem of high speed fault clearance for low frequency applications, where impedance measuring elements can be too slow. Finally, the increasingly important issue of relays in remote locations and communicating with a data gathering conirol centre, has been examined

REFERENCES
1. Dr L. Hu 8 , Dr R.E. Morrison, Stafford University - The Application of Shunt Compensation to AC Electrified Systems.

Mr D McQuillan PowerTrack Distribution Braking

Regenerative