2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Energy & Communication(CIEC) 747

A Low Cost Industrial Fuse Changeover System with

GSM Based Auto Annunciation
Achintya Mahata1, Bivash Mondal2 , J.N.Bera3, Sumana Chowdhuri4
Dept. of Applied Physics
U.C.S.T.A., C.U.
Kolkata, India
1
achint.disha@gmail.com, 2 bivash.haldia@gmail.com, 3 jitendrabera@rediffmail.com, 4 sumana_cu05@gmail.com

Abstract This paper illustrates the developments of GSM
message based Fuse alarming system to indicate the blown
condition of a fuse in a multi-fuse based electric supply system.
It has the capability of restoring the power through a standby
parallel path in an uninterrupted fashion. The controller has
the capacity of monitoring the status of 32 numbers loads.
Each load is supplied either by a main fuse or by a standby
fuse. Hence altogether 32 numbers of main fuses as well as 32
numbers of standby fuses can be monitored. As soon as the
main fuse blown is detected, a parallel path is provided by
turning on a standby fuse within few microsecond of elapsed
time. At the same time the fuse respective LED will be
displayed at the front panel to indicate the healthy and faulty
conditions of the fuse. A centralized Hooter/buzzer will also be
activated for any blown condition. On the other hand a
predefined message with fuse serial number will be sent to five
preset mobile numbers using a GSM modem. The power will
be interrupted for both main fuse and standby fuse blown.
After attending the fault, and once the fuse is restored on-line,
the system starts working with proper healthy running
indication. An ordinary low power processor is utilized and
total cost is very low.
Keywords GSM message, annunciation, main fuse, standby
fuse
I. INTRODUCTION
In a complex electric network infrastructure like
Railway, a very strong protection circuit is provided for
protecting different electric machines in its different system.
Today in the era of Wireless Communication Technology,
Industry automation has got a special advantage regarding
annunciation and protection circuits. Automatic detection of
any fault in a multi protection system in electric locomotive
requires continuous polling of each input to the load about its
healthy condition and if any fault occurs in the system, the
protection can be achieved replacing the main protective path
by some other standby protective circuit This automatic
protection circuit needs annunciation which can be done by
the introduction of GSM technology.
The application of less expensive but more powerful
microcontroller will lead this protection system more simple.
The convergence of microcontroller based hardware with the
wireless communication system (like GSM, GPRS) is
becoming very popular choice to the researchers and
scientists for such type of fault detecting, reporting,
diagnosis and control applications. The advantages of mobile
communication technology in the recent years have been
extensively used in different form in different application
areas. GSM (The Global System for Mobile
Communication) is a standard set developed by the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe
technologies for second generation (2G) digital cellular
network. Many researchers are working towards GSM-based
remote wireless automatic monitoring System [1]. The
authors in [2,3] describe a system for the remote monitoring
and control of complex stand-alone photovoltaic plants based
on GSM. There are many works done by the researchers to
monitor different power sources using GSM technology
[4,5,6].Authors in [7,8] have described some procedures for
condition monitoring of power stations equipments and
electrical machines of a multi-machine system.
Hence controller design for protection using embedded
controller along with GSM modem interface is a challenging
task for protecting railway infrastructure. The authors in [9]
have studied the application of GSM technology in
protecting Railway infrastructure and judged the
vulnerability of interference in GSM based system.
In this developed work the authors have designed a low
cost automatic protection circuit for multi-load system with
GSM based auto annunciation.
II. OPERATING PRINCIPLES
The proposed system has the capability to monitor the
load current of up to 32 nos. of load. Each load circuit is
protected by a fuse circuit which is termed as main fuse
circuit. If for any reasons other than short circuit, the main
fuse is blown. The load supply can be restored immediately
by a standby path containing another standby fuse and a
relay contact. Thus each load can be supplied by two paths-
one direct path through a Main fuse and the other path
contains one Standby fuse and one NO contact of a Relay
(Fig. 1). Hence to monitor all 32 load 64 nos. of Main fuse,
64 nos. of Standby fuse and 64 nos. of fuse sensors are used
in the system.

978-1-4799-2044-0/14/$31.002014IEEE
 2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Energy & Communication(CIEC)
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of total system
Again each fuse can have two states one for healthy
and other for blown state. The sensors sense the fuses
physical state which is indicated by individual LED
indication in the front panel of the controller. Thus altogether
128 LED indicates the status of each fuse out of which 64
nos. for healthy condition with green coloured LED and 64
nos. for faulty condition with RED coloured LED, as shown
in Fig: 2 using SLD.
For any faulty condition, an SMS is sent to five
consecutive mobile nos. and a remote buzzer/hooter is
activated to produce audible annunciation.
There are 8 nos. of Daughter boards in the protection
scheme and each board contains 4 nos. of channel. Each
Daughter board can be connected to a particular voltage level
of 24V DC, 60V DC or 110V AC (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Single line diagram of fuse changeover circuit for n loads
/channels
748
The system is made modular by design using DB and the
system has the capacity for monitoring 32 nos. of fuses from
0.6 Amp to 4 Amp capacities.
Optocoupler is used to provide isolation in input circuit
for every fuse. It is designed in such a way that both main
and standby fuses shall never work in parallel and standby
fuse shall only come in the circuit after the main fuse has
blown. As per the requirement the current drawn for the
monitoring purposes by each channel will never exceed more
than 3 mA for each fuses.
Features for Annunciation system
Common audio-visual alarm unit is designed with the
following features:
a) OK Indication if the system is healthy.
b) Common failure LED indication (RED) in case of any
main fuse getting blown out at the station.
c) Another LED indication (RED) if any of the standby
fuses also is blown along with its Main fuse. Both the LEDs
shall be lit in case of both Main and Standby getting blown.
d) Piezoelectric buzzer to give audio alarm for failure
conditions.
e) A Non locking type Push Button for acknowledgement
of Audio Alarm.
f) The equipment shall be so designed that any short/open
or any other defect in any of the component will not lead to
unsafe / undesirable situation.
g) GSM Modem connectivity: the system sends +SMS
on GSM network to up to 5 preselected GSM mobile
numbers in case of any of the main fuse blowing. The mobile
numbers shall be configurable. First SMS shall be generated
within 30 seconds of fuse blowing and subsequent sending of
SMSs shall be tried by the system immediately. Besides this,
provision of separate message indicating blowing of main &
standby fuse may also be there. A separate message should
again be generated when a main fuse is replaced. There shall
be an arrangement through which one GSM modem can
monitor all systems installed and at one station.
TABLE I. SMS GENERATION CHART
EVENT SMS
ATTENTION: FUSE BLOWN AT
Main fuse blown, standby
STATION XXXX, STANDBY
operative
OPERATIVE
Main and Standby both ATTENTION: BOTH FUSES BLOWN AT
fuses blown STATION XXXX
BLOWN FUSE REPLACED AT
Fuse Restored
STATION XXXX.
The GSM modem shall be compatible for 1800 MHz. It
shall support GPRS class 10. It shall be working on 110V
AC and suitable power supply adapter. It shall be able to
 2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Energy & Communication(CIEC) 749

withstand operating temperature up to 70 C and humidity up
to 95. It shall be from reputed make. When a fuse blows, it
shall generate SMSs as shown in TABLE I. Station code:
XXXX (to be fed in the system with flexibility of change by
user).
MCB is also connected to the GSM modem and other
annunciation circuit like LED indications and buzzer (Fig.
7). The Main Board senses the data of each daughter card
from common data bus using Time Division Multiple Access
as shown in Fig. 6.

III. IMPLEMENTATION

A. Hardware Design
The overall system hardware is assembled in housing as
shown in Fig. 3. It has the following three basic hardware
modules which are described as follows.

Fig. 5. Channel Multiplexing using TDMA principle

Fig. 3. Experimental setup

1) Design of Daughter Board (DB)

There are eight DB connected to the MCB. In each DB
has four channels containing one Main fuse and one standby
fuse in each channel. In each DB an 8 bit microcontroller
based control circuit has been designed to sense the presence
of power. Each daughter board can be connected to a
particular voltage level of 24V DC, 60V DC or 110V AC.
Fig. 6. Timing diagram for TDMA
3) GSM Modem Interfacing with Microcontroller
The GSM modem (i-300 GSM Modem. It supports GSM
07.07, 07.05 and SIMCOM enhanced AT commands) is
built with a COM port with RS232 protocol based
interfacing facility. Hence the microcontroller is interfaced
with the modem using 9600, N, 8, 1 protocol after the
necessary hardware interfacing for proper TTL to RS 232
level conversion (Fig. 5). As the modem works on AT
command sets, following AT commands are to be sent to
the modem in order to execute the SMS services

Fig. 4. Schematic Diagram of Daughter Board (DB) unit-1

2) Design of Main Controller Board (MCB)

This MCB acts as the main control unit where all
Fig. 7. MCB interfacing with GSM and annunciations
information regarding the failure or healthiness come. This
MCB is also based on one eight bit microcontroller. This
 2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Energy & Communication(CIEC) 750

B. Firmware Design 3. The microcontroller sends another query by sending

1) Firmware for DB AT+CPIN? to get the PIN (Personal Identification
If any fault occurs in one of the four channels in each DB Number).
it instantly gives control signal to the relay driver circuit so 4. If the SIM card is ready for the use, the response +CPIN:
that the standby fuse gets ON through the relay. At the same READY is returned.
time the controller of DB sends the faulty information to the
MCB. After this, following AT commands are to be sent for the
required SMS services:
If standby fuse is also blown OFF this information is also
sent to the MCB. The steps of firmware for the Daughter 5. For the configuration of the GSM modem in text mode of
Board (DB) controller of multi fuse changeover circuit are as SMS the AT Command AT+CMGF = 1 is to be sent.
follows: 6. In order to send the SMS, the desired mobile number is to
1. Initialise all the parameters for the DB programming be sent with AT+CMGS=+91xxxxxxxxxxAT
Command.
2. Daughter board scan all the fuses connected to this card.
7. The desired message, containing a maximum of 160
3. It is able to detect the healthiness of the fuses. If any main characters, is to be constructed and to be sent to the
fuse has blown it automatically switches over to the modem.
standby path by making the corresponding relay on.
8. After then the ASCII code for CTRL+Z character is also
4. A bit pattern corresponding to the running conditions of to be sent to the modem in order to transmit the message to
both main and standby fuses will be generated on every mobile phone +91xxxxxxxxxx.
scan.
5. The bit pattern will be sent to the main board on a request IV. RESULT
from the main board The system is tested in the laboratory by applying four
2) Firmware for MCB different voltages in four different daughter boards. The
indication range of the first daughter board is 1to 16. The
The steps of firmware for the Main Controller Board first group of four is used for main fuses healthy indication,
(MCB) controller of multi fuse changeover circuit is as second group of four indicates healthy condition of standby
follows fuses, third group of four indicates faulty condition of main
fuses, fourth group of four indicates faulty condition of
1. Initialise all the parameters for the programming. standby fuses. The Fig. 8 shows a typical healthy indication
of a main fuse and a standby fuse where only green LEDs
2. Initialise the serial interrupt service routine for serial data
are glowing. Fig. 9 shows the sms as on the mobile as
predefined communication at 9600 BAUD rate, with even
generated from the GSM based auto annunciation system.
parity.
3. Initialise the EEPROM.
4. Store five Mobile Numbers in EEPROM.
5. The main board will send a request to all the Daughter
Boards (DB) sequentially for receiving the bit patterns.
6. The visual annunciations in the form of LED indication
will be displayed in the front panel of the controller as per
the bit patterns. Two situations are indicated by two LED
colour (RED for faulty, GREEN for healthy).
7. If any fault condition is received, apart from the LED
indication the MCB also sends some SMS to five
preloaded mobile numbers with the help of GSM modem.
8. If main fuse is replaced, another message should again be
generated
Fig. 8. Healthy indication of fuses
3) Firmware for GSM
The GSM message service can be generated by the
following steps:
1. First the microcontroller has to send AT command
word.
2. A response ok is returned from the GSM modem.
 2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Energy & Communication(CIEC)
Fig. 9. SMS on Mobile presenting a faulty condition
V. CONCLUSION
An easy and unique scheme of fuse health condition
monitoring and auto annunciation system development is
described in this paper.
If, for any kind of transient nature of fault the main fuse
blown off. The provision of restoring supply by a standby
fuse within a microsecond of time leads to the uninterrupted
supply and for its awareness, an audio visual annunciation
will be activated including sending of some text message.
The use of TDMA principle makes the system very
simple by reducing the complexity of handling of huge no. of
I/O lines by the main controller. This makes the system very
compact, more efficient, easy to debug for any system fault,
reduces production time and hence overall cost of the system
is very low.
The scanning for TDMA operation is kept very high so
that any faulty condition can be detected within few
seconds of time and action can be taken accordingly.
Another feature of the system is that it does not have any
key-board interfacing. But still the five mobile no. can be
edited for sending the SMS. The editing of the mobile nos.
can also be done with an editing SMS that is to be sent to
this system from any other mobile no. by an authenticated/
authorized person.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge RSOP, CPRI Bangalore,
Ministry of Power, Govt. of India and UGC SAP DRS-I
project, for providing the necessary infrastructural facilities
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