Incorporating a Condition Monitoring Based Aging Failure Model of a Circuit Breaker in Substation Reliability Assessment

This paper presents a circuit breaker (CB) aging failure model based on condition monitoring. This model is inserted into a basic CB Markov model and applied in substation reliability assessment. The proposed model can accurately incorporate the wearing status and aging process of CBs. The results from applying the proposed method to a utility substation configuration demonstrate that ignoring aging failures of CBs can lead to significant underestimation of substation unreliability.