Circuit Breakers are highly critical to the power-protection system given their assignment of physically interrupting power flow to protect critical assets. However, the misoperation of breakers remains one of the most common failure points. If a breaker is not functioning correctly:
- Other equipment is exposed to through faults. Over time this shortens the life of the assets or even leads to failure. Equipment failure poses a threat to worker safety and the potential to damage other critical assets.
- It can result in an outage resulting in financial penalties.
While cyclic testing and maintenance of a circuit breaker’s operating systems by maintenance personnel are the most common means of keeping breakers in optimal operating conditions, this approach can sometimes lead to misdiagnosis of potential failure modes. The challenges of offline testing include:
- To take the breaker out of service for testing, you have to operate the breaker. Operation of the breaker before testing can mean early development of problems going undetected.
- Offline testing consumes time and resources due to sending multiple people to site.
- Testing is not being carried out under normal operating conditions.
- Reliance on auxiliary contacts such as the 52A and 52B, which can stick and malfunction, providing an inaccurate data point.
Through the application of online breaker monitoring, many of the conditions which can lead to breaker failure can be identified in their incipient stages, allowing for prognostic evaluation of breaker conditions to trigger corrective maintenance before the occurrence of a system event.