With the experience of working in more than 500 Plants with various types of Electrical services, I have come to know about the different problems Engineers face during Maintenance and Breakdown. Instead of keeping the exposure limited to me I decided to share it with my fellow engineers here by writing case studies. One such case study is as follows.
Many of you have Numerical Relays in your plant for protecting different Electrical equipment's like Generator, Transformers, Transmission lines and Motors. But, many times we don’t use Numerical Relay to its full or atleast 80% of its capability. I have noticed that still in many plants, people don't know how to download settings, Fault Record and configurations from Numerical Relay.
Using Numerical relay to its maximum potential
Many Engineers use Numerical Relay just to see the data, settings and fault records in but they can be used for more than that.
- You can yourself do programming on Numerical Relays
- You can make logic's which may help in better plant operations
- You can use all the binary input and output for better equipment availability and fault discrimination.
- And many other things too.
Majority of these Numerical relays have a port (If you have opted for such type of Relays), using which you can communicate with the Relay using your laptop using that Relay Software.
For Schneider, ABB and few more free software is available on their website, which can be downloaded and used to connect your Numerical Relay with Laptop using a communication cable (which you may already have, normally OEM give Communication cable & Laptop during panel supply)
Download the Software on Laptop, procure a communication cable, connect and use the Relay to analyze faults. It will help you in finding solutions for many of your plant faults. If you don't know how to communicate relays, whenever any testing team comes to your plant ask them to teach you.
It will help you while Replacing relays, you can also directly copy settings and configurations them from old relays to new equivalent relays. You can download the Fault record or Event Record and you can analyze the fault and may be able to reach on a conclusion.
About the Author
Avinash Singh is an Electrical Engineer with over 11 years of rich experience in Electrical Maintenance, Installation, Testing, and Commissioning of all major Electrical equipments. He is specialized in bringing down Energy Cost of a Plant by reducing electricity bills and increasing energy efficiency. He also reduces plant breakdown cost by implementing proper maintenance activities during routine and shutdown. Through these Case Studies he shares his experience and challenges faced in his work routine with the readers of Circuit Digest.
