Design and Analysis on the Turn-to-Turn Fault Protection Scheme for the Control Winding of a Magnetically Controlled Shunt Reactor

AC overvoltage emerges on dc buses of a magnetically controlled shunt reactor when a turn-to-turn fault occurs within the control winding (CtrW). Overvoltage protections are thus employed. However, this paper addresses a problem in the application of overvoltage protection against CtrW turn-to-turn faults where such a protective scheme may operate in an unacceptable time delay or even malfunction in some fault cases. It is shown that the ac overvoltage on dc buses during a turn-to-turn fault tends to be intermittent voltage spikes rather than standard sinusoidal waveform, and the fault feature may even not exist in some cases. The cause of the problem is investigated in this paper by dividing the operating state for the excitation system into three stages. It is proved that the appearance of overvoltage on dc buses is dependent on zero-crossing of the total control current. Simulation results and physical model tests have demonstrated the theoretical analysis in this paper. Moreover, a new protective scheme that is capable of detecting a 2% CtrW turn-to-turn fault by using the fundamental component in the total control current is proposed.