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I-NERGY enables condition based monitoring strategies for critical assets in power systems

Power systems are asset intensive sectors that require important technological and coordination efforts in order to adequately monitor the health of the different classes of assets in order to maintain the operational safety of the system. One class of devices, which are responsible for the protection of the system against faults are circuit breakers. These are a core asset, whose function is to eliminate system faults, ensuring that these do not cause cascading effects and minimizing risks of physical damage for other assets.

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Energy

Circuit Breakers are composed of different components and can belong to different families of devices, each one with its own technical specificities. As one example, these can use air, oil or SF6 gas as insulator materials. Depending on the family of circuit break considered, these have not only different application ranges (e.g. different voltage levels) but also different sensoring mechanisms. The different characteristics result as well in different adequate maintenance strategies, particularly for companies that use simultaneously different families of these devices in their networks.

Taking into account the operational conditions during their lifetime, circuit breakers are subject to different currents and voltages. Particular pressure points correspond to maneuvering operations for opening the circuit breakers, either in the case of a fault, or even in the case of normal operation conditions (e.g. to perform a topological change in the grid). In typical applications, maintenance of circuit breakers follows a specific schedule given by the manufacturer, in addition to other operational level constrains and information received from the device. Unscheduled maintenance can also occur if the device has some kind of malfunctioning (e.g. an alarm related to oil pressure loss). However, these maintenance strategies are device based and usually do not consider their operational data neither the historical of operations to which that circuit breaker was subjected.

In I-NERGY, we aim to create a condition based monitoring service for circuit breakers that allows the responsible asset departments of system operators to visualize the historical of operational conditions of their devices in an integrated way. This solution considers the following aspects:

  • Usage of historical COMTRADE data, related to all previous circuit breakers operations to synthetize all operations that each circuit breaker was subjected. This is done at system level and using a systematic approach, centralizing data for all circuit breakers in a single application.
  • Infer possible degradation of device operational characteristics (e.g. time to open and eliminate a fault) during their lifetime.
  • Infer possible correlations between operational conditions and off-grid data (e.g. weather data) to stratify risk of different assets.

These services will allow system operators to quickly visualize the operational conditions of their circuit breakers and to obtain system level information, which can be used to improve asset management strategies and reduce operational risks to their network.

I-NERGY