failures of capacitor elements (internally fused banks) unitsor (externally fused banks). Overall, capacitor banks are protected by a combination of fuses, which remove the failed unit or element, and protective relays, which alarm and trip the bank offline.
Capacitor banks require a means of unbalance protection to avoid overvoltage conditions, which would lead to cascading failures and possible tank ruptures. Figure 7. Bank connection at bank, unit and element levels. The primary protection method uses fusing.
What happens if a capacitor bank fails?
V. INTERNAL OVERVOLTAGE AND ITS APPLICATION IN SETTING THE UNBALANCE PROTECTION ELEMENTS A failure in a capacitor bank causes an internal overvoltage inside the bank (see Fig. 9 and Fig. 10). This overvoltage may cause more failures, which in turn creates even higher overvoltage, and eventually, leads to a cascading failure.
What can we learn from failure tests on complex capacitor banks?
The lessons learned from these failure tests on complex capacitor banks include the following: • Failure of even a single element can generally be detected by voltage or current protection elements, even on internally fused banks.
Why do fuseless capacitor banks have higher failure voltages and currents?
But, typically, externally fused capacitor banks have higher failure voltages and currents than fuseless or internally fused banks because an external fuse blowing causes the loss of an entire unit. As a point of reference, fuseless capacitor banks have a unit construction, as shown in Fig. 1 . Fig. 1. Fuseless unit in a wye-connected bank
The objective of the capacitor bank protection is to alarm on the failure of some minimum number of elements or units and trip on some higher number of failures. It is, of course, desirable to detect any element failure. II. ELEMENT AND UNIT FAILURES EXAMINED
Why do capacitor bank voltages and currents unbalance in per-unit values?
We achieved this simplicity by working in per-unit values. It is apparent that an unbalance in capacitor bank voltages and currents is a result of a difference between the faulted and healthy parts of the bank. As such, the per-unit voltage or current unbalance is independent of the absolute characteristics of the faulted and healthy parts.