Current Transformer Saturation Segmentation Using
Morphological Gradient-Based Detectors
L. L. Zhang, Member IEEE, T. Y. Ji, Member IEEE, M. S. Li, Member IEEE, Q. H. Wu, Fellow IEEE
School of Electric Power Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China.
Email: wuqh@scut.edu.cn
Abstract—This paper presents a novel algorithm for secondary
current signal segmentation of saturated current transformer
(CT) using three morphological gradient-based detectors. The
saturation onset detector is used to monitor the occurrence of
saturation and then trigger the positive/negative segmentation
detector, which are designed to locate the starting point and the
ending point of CT saturation. The saturation segments are
determined by combined the output of the two segmentation
detectors. Simulation studies are conducted in PSCAD/EMTDC
to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The
simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method can
accurately determine the saturation segments.
Index Terms—current transformer, mathematical morphology,
differential protection, saturation detection.
I. INTRODUCTION
Iron core current transformers (CTs) are widely used for
both measurement and protection purposes in electrical power
systems. The iron core may saturated during an external fault
due to the large fault current, and thus the secondary current
will be distorted. This may lead to inaccurate current
measurement and malfunction of the differential protection.
Thus, in order to improve the reliability of the protection system,
the adverse impact of the CT saturation must be relays must be
eliminated.
The probability of saturation of iron core can be greatly
reduced by reasonably selecting current transformer in practical
application. However, the fault current in the power system
may be dozens of times greater than the current normal
operation, and thus the core flux density is much larger than the
steady state. To ensure the transformer core will not saturate
under all the fault transient conditions, the size and cost of the
iron core will be very high [1]. Therefore, it is not practical way
of avoiding iron core saturation by only design and deployment.
In recent years, current transformers based on Rogowski
coil and optical fiber are designed and applied in some
demonstration projects. However, the reliability of these
electronic transformers still need to be examined and improved
before they can be widely used. Before that, iron core current
transformer will be still the main type of current transformers.
In this respect, many researcher are inspired to work on
detection of CT saturation and compensation of saturated
secondary current.
One way to avoid malfunction of differential protection
when CT saturated during external fault is to blocked the
protection once CT saturation is detected. This scheme is
simple, but it lower the sensitivity and response speed of the
protection [3]. Therefore, approaches that can accurately
compensate the saturated current and calculate the phasor of
differential current are more preferable. Several methods [4-7]
for compensating the saturated secondary current of CT based
on approximate CT model have been presented. In [4] and [5],
the secondary currents is compensated by magnetizing current
calculating form the magnetization curve. These methods and
the like can be conducted only if the parameters of CT are
available. Parameter identification of current transformer are
introduced in [6] and [7]. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) [8-
11] are also used to reconstruct the secondary current, however,
which need a large data set for training and its computational
load is heavy. Reference [12, 13] present methods to detect the
saturation firstly and then estimate the parameters of the
unsaturated portions and then calculate the current phasor for
the followed saturated portions. Many methods can detect the
starting of the saturated portion, but the detection of the ending
of saturated portion is still a challenge because the change in
the current at the ending point is much smoother than that at the
starting point.
In order to avoid the shortcomings of the existing methods,
a new method based on morphological gradient (MG) is
proposed to detect CT saturation in this paper. The
morphological gradient are performed using three different
structuring elements (SEs). The structuring element with its
origin at its center is used to detect the occurrence of saturation.
After that, the structuring element with its origin at its left hand
is used to locate the starting point and ending point of the
saturation portion of the positive current. The structuring
element with its origin at its right hand is used to locate the
starting point and ending point of the saturation portion of the
negative current. The final saturation segmentation is based on
the combination of the outputs of the positive detector and
negative detector. The proposed method can make accurate
segmentation with five-sample delay and does not need
previous knowledge of CT.
II. MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY
Mathematical morphology is a powerful image/signal
processing tool, which was originally developed as a tool in
geometrical analysis and description [14]. It was established by
introducing fundamental operators applied to two sets. One set,
which is the image/signal, is processed by another, known as
the structuring element (SE), which is translated over the
image/signal as a probe. Morphological operators are set
transformations which are very efficient for ameliorating the
quality of signals or for extracting some of their features. With
appropriate use, they can process signals and preserve their
intrinsic characteristics[15].
There are two basic morphological operators, dilation and
erosion, which form a pair of dual transforms and are defined
as follows:
S †G (S  g ) (1)
gG
S G (S  g ) (2)
gG
In order to use MM in signal processing where most signals
are not binary, morphological operators should be extended to
a grey-scale level. Instead of performing dilation and erosion
by union and intersection as in the binary case, they are
performed by algebraic addition and subtraction in the
greyscale case. In gray scale signal processing, these two
morphological operators defined as follows:
( f † g )( x) max{ f ( x  s)  g (s)} (3)
s For a fault current with positive DC offset, the CT
(f g )( x) min{ f ( x  s)  g (s)} (4)
s for a fault current with positive DC offset, the CT secondary
where f and g are the input signal and the SE, respectively;
( x  s)  D f , ( x  s)  D f and s  Dg ; D f and Dg are the
domains of f ( x) and g ( s) .
As explained previously, the SE is a small set used to probe
the signal under study. Depending on the problem to be solved,
the structuring element can have different shapes and sizes. A
simple case is that the SE has the form of g(s) = 0, s Ѯ Dg,
which is referred to as a ‘flat SE’. Hence, definitions of dilation
and erosion degrade to [16]:
( f † g )( x) max{ f ( x  s)} (5)
s
(f g )( x) min{ f ( x  s)} (6)
s
where the dilation operator calculates the maximum value
within the neighborhood of f ( x) , and the erosion operator
calculates the minimum value within the neighborhood of
f ( x) . Intuitively, dilation can be imagined as swelling or
expanding, and erosion can be thought of as a shrinking
procedure.
All of the other morphological transformations, such as
opening, closing, and morphological filters, are based on these
two basic operators.
III. SATURATION DETECTORS
A. Saturation Onset Dectector
The morphological gradient is frequency used for edge
detection in image and sudden change detection in signal
processing, which is defined as the arithmetic difference
between the dilation and erosion of a signal by an SE. The MG
is usually defined as:
G( f ) f † g  f g (7)
In this paper, a structuring element with its origin at its
center is employed to perform the MG, as it is capable of
effectively suppressing various kinds of noises and does not
blur the sudden changes in the signals. The MG-based
saturation onset detector has large impulse in the output when
the secondary current signal of current transformer change
suddenly, regardless of the polarity of the change. Therefore, it
can be used to detect the onset of saturation and thus it can be
used as a trigger of the following saturation segmentation
detectors.
B. Saturation Segmentation Detectors
At the beginning of saturation, the change in the magnitude
of the current is large while the change is much smaller at the
end of saturation, which makes methods based on threshold
comparison hard to find the ending points of saturation. The
output of the saturation onset detector only gives the
information of the onset of saturation, therefore, two MG-based
segmentation detectors are designed to determine the ending
points of the saturation.
secondary current is descending due to saturation. In contrast,
current is descending during saturation. In this respect, we
design two detectors to examine the negative change and the
positive change in CT secondary current, respectively. With
this purpose, two morphological gradient-based detectors with
two different SEs are defined:
G( f g  ) f † g  f g (8)
G( f g  ) f † g  f g (9)
where
g {g1 , g2 , }, gl 1 , gl } (10)
g {g1 , g2 , }, gl 1 , gl } (11)
where the underlined samples represent the origin. Apparently,
the two SEs have the same shape and the same size, and the
only difference lies in the position of the origin. The detector
with structuring element g  , namely positive detector, is for the
detection of the positive change and the detector with
structuring element g  , namely negative detector, is for the
detection of the negative change.
For the saturation of single polarity, the output of
positive/negative detector will have two maximum outputs in
every cycle, which correspond to the saturation starting point
and ending point respectively. For the bipolar saturation, both
the positive and negative detector has two maximum outputs in
every cycle. The saturation segments can be determined by the
positions of these maximums.
 IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION 0% remanence within the CT core. The distortion of the
A. Simulation Model secondary current starts at the before the faulted current
reaching its peak. The output of the positive and negative
A typical model of a 50 Hz power system with a 230 kV and
detector are similar to the results shown in Fig. 2. As the
100 km transmission line, as shown in Fig. 1 is established in
PSCAD/EMTDC for the simulation studies. saturation become more severe, the saturation segment is larger.
Fig. 3(c) clearly shows that the proposed accurately detects the
.
Vm f . distorted sections of the original secondary current waveform.
M N Vn
CT 1 CT 2
50 iref i2 f g+

Current (A)
‫ = ܯܧ‬23 0ğ0°, ‫ = ܰܧ‬23 0ğ20°, ܼ‫ = ܼܰ = ܯ‬9. 186 + j 40.192¡ 0
ܴ1 = 0. 0346¡/ km, ‫ܮ‬1 = 1. 3482 mH/ km, ‫ܥ‬1 = 0. 0086­F / km
ܴ0 = 0.3 000¡/ km, ‫ܮ‬0 = 3. 6340 mH/ km, ‫ܥ‬0 = 0. 0062­F / km
-50
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Fig. 1 Model of the sample power system. Time (ms)
(a)
The Lucas model is employed to simulate the saturation 50 iref i2 f g-

Current (A)
characteristics of CT, the setting is shown in Table I [2]. For all
cases presented here, the CT saturation is simulated under the 0
condition that a phase-to-ground fault occurs at the location 30
km away from Bus 1. The sampling rate of the system is 4000 -50
Hz. 0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24
Time (ms)
0.26 0.28 0.3
(b)
1.5
TABLE I. PARAMETERS OF CT 1

Saturation status
1
Turn ratio 300/1 0.5
Fundamental Frequency 50 Hz 0

Mean core length 0.448 m -0.5

0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Cross section area 0.00168 m2 Time (ms)
(c)
Winding resistance 2.1 Ω Fig. 2 Saturation detection of the case with -80% residual flux in iron core;
(a) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of positive detector
Air core inductance 0.85 mH output; (b) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of negative
Saturation fux density 1.88 T detector output; (c) the combined saturation status.

Nominal burden 8 VA
50 iref i2 f g+
Current (A)

B. The effect of residual flux

0
1) -80% residual flux: Fig. 2 shows the detecting result in
the case of a remanence of -80% flux in the CT core. The -50
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
polarity of the remanence is opposite to that of the DC offset, Time (ms)
(a)
which results in a slight distortion beginning at the first cycle of
50
the fault secondary current, as shown in Fig. 2. In Fig. 2(a) and iref i2 f g-
Current(A)

Fig. 2(b), the dotted line represent the primary current referred 0
to secondary side, the dashed line represent the secondary
current, the solid lines represent the detecting result of positive -50
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
CT saturation detector and negative CT saturation detector, Time (ms)
(b)
respectively. As the saturation occurs at the positive part of the 1.5
Saturation status

secondary current, the positive detector is launched once the 1

saturation is detected. In contrast, the negative detector is 0.5
blocked and it output is always zero, as shown in Fig. 2(b). 0
Therefore, the saturation segmentation is determined by the -0.5
output of the positive detector. In every cycle, the first 0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24
Time (ms)
0.26 0.28 0.3

maximum corresponds to the starting point and the second (c)

maximum corresponds to the ending point. The overall
segmentation is shown in Fig. 2(c). For the saturation status, ‘0’
and ‘1’ indicate that the CT is unsaturated and saturated,
respectively.
2) 0% residual flux: The extent of the distortion gradually
becomes more severe as the remanence increases from a
negative value to a positive value. The case shown in Fig. 3 has
Fig. 3. Saturation detection of the case with 0% residual flux in iron core;
(a) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of positive detector
output; (b) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of negative
detector output; (c) the combined saturation status.
3) 80% residual flux: Fig. 4 illustrates the distortion
associated with 80% residual flux which is the maximum flux
possible from a practical CT. Under this situation, the transit
flux has a very short effective excursion before saturation detectors. The results shown in Fig.6(c) indicate that the
occurs. It is apparent from the figure that the distortion of the secondary current waveform includes two saturated segments
secondary current is the severest in comparison with other and two unsaturated segments per cycle.
situations. It begins only a few milliseconds after fault occurs.
50
However, this change just have a small impact on the iref i2 f g+

Current (A)
performance of the morphological gradient-based detectors.
0
The results shown in Fig. 4 indicate that the proposed method
can accurately determine the interval of saturation even when
-50
the secondary current is severely distorted due to a high residual 0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Time (ms)
flux. (a)
50
iref i2 f g-

Current (A)
50 iref i2 f g+ 0
Current (A)

0
-50
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Time (ms)
-50 (b)
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3 1.5
Time (ms)

Saturation status
(a) 1

50 iref i2 f g- 0.5
Current (A)

0
0
-0.5
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Time (ms)
-50 (c)
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Time (ms) Fig. 5. Saturation detection of the case with negative DC-offset; (a) the
(b)
1.5 referred, distorted secondary current and output of positive detector output; (b)
the referred, distorted secondary current and output of negative detector output;
Saturation status

1
(c) the combined saturation status.
0.5

0
60
-0.5 iref i2 f g+
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3 40
Current (A)

Time (ms)
(c) 20
0
Fig. 4. Saturation detection of the case with 80% residual flux in iron core; -20
(a) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of positive detector
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
output; (b) the referred (dashed line), distorted secondary current and output of Time (ms)
negative detector output; (c) the combined saturation status. (a)
60
C. The Performance on Negative DC-Offest iref i2 f g-
Current (A)

40

The polarity of DC offset is related to the fault inception 20

angle. Different from the case in Fig. 3, the fault inception angle 0

is delay by 180q , which leads to the negative DC offset shown -20

in Fig. 5. In this case, the positive detector is blocked and its 0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24
Time (ms)
0.26 0.28 0.3

output is always zero. In contrast, the negative detector is 1.5

(b)

launched once the saturation occurs and its output can be used
Saturation status

1
to determine the saturation segments. The results shown in Fig.
5(c) indicate that the proposed method accurately detect the 0.5

starting point and ending point of saturation of fault current 0

with negative DC offset. -0.5
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Time (ms)
D. The Performance on AC Saturation (c)

AC saturation of a CT is caused by a high fault current
magnitude or a high burden impedance [2]. To investigate the
performance of the proposed method on AC saturation, a short-
circuit event without a decaying dc component is simulated, as
shown in Fig. 6. It can be seen from that the secondary current
of the CT is distorted both in the positive half cycles and
negative half cycles. Therefore, both the positive detector and
the negative detector are launched and the saturation segments
are determined by the combination of the outputs of these two
Fig. 6. AC Saturation detection of the case with 0% residual flux in iron
core; (a) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of positive detector
output; (b) the referred, distorted secondary current and output of negative
detector output; (c) the combined saturation status.
E. Comparison Studies
To further evaluate the performance of the proposed method,
comparison studies are carried out on the difference-based
detection method and the SMMG-based method [17]. The
SMMG method also uses MM to analyze the waveform of a
signal, and it has been proved to have relatively good
performance when compared with other detection methods [17].
The solid lines in Fig. 7(a) and Fig. 7(b) represent the output
signals obtained by the SMMG method performed on the case
as depicted in Fig. 3 at levels 1 and 2, respectively. The output
signals of the SMMG method, of both 2-order and 4-order
SMMG, have large impulses where saturations occur in every
cycle while its output is almost zero at the saturation ending
point, as shown in Fig. 7(b) and Fig. 7(c). Therefore, the
SMMG method cannot accurately determine the saturation
segments. The comparison study demonstrates that the
performance of the proposed method is superior to the SMMG
method.
50 iref
Current (A)
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This project was supported by Guangdong Innovative
Research Team Program (No. 201001N0104744201) and the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.
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