Detection and location of low-level arcing faults in metal-clad electrical apparatus

This paper describes the development and testing of a microprocessor based system for detecting and locating switchgear system low-level arcing faults. Four parameters of the arcing phenomena are monitored for detecting arcs. This makes the performance more reliable than the techniques that use fewer phenomena. Some results that show the performance of the developed system are presented in the paper. The cases include arcs at different locations inside and outside a transformer, and operation during normal loads.