International Journal of Electrical and Electronics

Engineering Research (IJEEER)

ISSN 2250-155X
Vol. 3, Issue 2, Jun 2013, 277-284
© TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

A REVIEW OF DISTINGUISHING SCHEMES FOR POWER TRANSFORMER’S

MAGNETIZING INRUSH AND FAULT CURRENTS

VINAY BARHATE
Electrical Engineering Department, Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management, Nagpur University,
Nagpur, India

ABSTRACT

It has always been a brain churning exercise for practising Power Engineers that how to get rid of problem of
Magnetizing inrush current which causes pseudo tripping signal when a fresh Power transformer is required to put into
service. In this paper, an attempt is made to put together all the developed techniques for Discrimination between
Magnetizing Inrush and Internal Fault currents in protection of power transformers. This paper starts with conventional
methods like 2nd harmonic restraint and harmonic blocking under differential protection and proceeds to the DFT, WT,
WPT and then most recent techniques using Artificial Neural Networks, Fuzzy logic, Fuzzy- Neuro techniques. The set of
references of all concerned papers and a summary of the work presented by distinguished researchers is mentioned here
using various tools as MATLAB, PSCAD, EMTDC.

KEYWORDS: Power Transformer, Magnetizing Inrush Current, Differential Protection, Wavelet Transforms, Artificial
Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Neural Network

INTRODUCTION

Large Power Transformers is very expensive equipment in Electrical Transmission systems and it requires special
attention being a vital component especially when it comes to save mal functioning / false tripping of Differential
protection Relay scheme. The Power Transformer protection scheme should avoid and block the tripping of Differential
relay during Magnetizing Inrush and should rapidly operate the relay tripping during internal faults. Therefore it is required
to choose a proper Identification scheme which can discriminate and distinguishes the Magnetizing inrush and internal
fault current while a new Power Transformer is being installed by power companies. Review of such techniques is
attempted here by analysing various schemes.

Transformer inrush currents can be divided into three categories: Energization inrush, recovery inrush, and
sympathetic inrush. The first, energization inrush, results from the reapplication of system voltage to a transformer which
has been previously de-energized. The second, recovery inrush, occurs when transformer voltage is restored after having
been reduced by a nearby short circuit on the system. The third, sympathetic inrush can occur while an unloaded
Transformer, which is being switched on, experiences an inrush, an adjacent Transformer, which is in service, may also
experience a smaller degree of inrush. This sympathetic inrush may also occur when two or more transformers are operated
in parallel. Offsets in inrush currents can circulate in transformers already energized, which in turn causes a mild inrush.

Energization inrush is the most commonly investigated form of inrush, and can result in the large current
magnitudes. Fig.1 shows the inrush current with and without resonance .When we assume that transformer is switched on
at positive zero, even if the initial value of flux is zero but subsequently the flux must have the same rate of change and
same wave form as it has in steady state. Thus, the flux must reach a peak value of +2фm in half a cycle. Since power
transformers operate near the knee of saturation curve, a flux demand of 2фm drives the transformer core deep into
278 Vinay Barhate

saturation, causing it to draw a very large magnetising current with a peaky non-sinusoidal waveform, called inrush current.
These magnetising currents are very high, of the order of 8 to 30 times the full load current.

Figure 1: Inrush Current

Further, as such high current flows only on one side of the transformer, on the side which is being connected to
supply; it looks like an internal fault to the Differential scheme and ends up as spill current. The shape, magnitude and
duration of inrush current depend on several factors such as Size of transformer, Impedance of system from which a
transformer is energized, Magnetic properties of the core material, Remanence in the core, Way a transformer is switched
in.

The problems caused by inrush are unbalance and harmonics. Other disturbances caused by inrush are: Incorrect
operation and failures of electrical machines and relay systems, Irregular voltage distribution along the transformer
windings, High amount of voltage drop at the power system at energization times, Electrical and mechanical vibrations
among the windings of the transformer.

Magnetizing inrush current makes transformer protection a challenge to researchers. M. Jamali et al [1]
investigated the effects of some parameters on the characteristics of inrush current in MATLAB Simulink. Their results
showed that increasing switching angle at a positive remanent flux or source resistance will decrease the amplitude of
inrush current. It has been shown that largest second harmonic content may not necessarily appear at the first cycle. The
effect of remanent flux on the first cycle peak current shows that it has large changes when the remanent flux varies.
Also, it has been concluded that for reducing inrush current, an appropriate switching angle by considering remanent flux,
must be selected.

Abdolmutaleb Abou-Safe et al [2] presented a mathematical model for an unloaded saturated transformer. The
model uses non-linear core parameters (R and L ), which vary according to the magnetic state of the non-linear core. A
comparison between experimental and simulated results showed a good agreement and proved the validity of this model
for studying in-rush current. The results of their research showed the risks of connecting an unloaded power transformer to
the power system. It was recommended that this phenomenon is taken into account when protection devices on the
Transformer are adjusted, to avoid mal-operations and consequent tripping of the transformer circuit breaker.

The scholars have researched a lot, some conventional techniques to distinguish between inrush current and
internal fault currents in transformers are reported here based on different principles.

The second harmonic restraint method is the most common one used by various relay manufacturers and
application engineers. There are a few variations of harmonic restrained differential protection. Jialong Wang [3], in his
A Review of Distinguishing Schemes for Power Transformer’s Magnetizing Inrush and Fault Currents 279

paper analysed factors affecting the second harmonic ratio in inrush current, and described various harmonic restraint
methods and compared their performance.

The above mentioned methods are successful to some extents but practically there are some conditions where
predetermined threshold is not sufficient to make a decision, and mal-operation of relay occurs. Problems in identifying
inrush using second harmonics component are: firstly, the magnitude of the second harmonic in fault current can be close
to or greater than that present in the magnetizing inrush current. Next, the second harmonic components in the magnetizing
inrush currents tend to be relatively small in modern large power transformers. Consequently, differential protection
technique based on the second harmonic restraint may fail.

In Fifth Harmonic blockade technique, Ouahdi Dris et al [4] has stated in their paper, based on the fact that the
inrush current has a second-harmonic component of the differential current which is much larger in the case of inrush than
for a fault, and the over-excitation current has a larger fifth-harmonic component. And as the use of digital protection
offers the advantage to implement complexes algorithms such as DFT to ensure better extraction of fundamental and other
harmonic components, then the use of the second and the fifth harmonics for restraining and blocking, by the differential
protection will give a possibility to discriminate between the faulty and the normal state of power transformer.

Most of the conventional transformer protection relays employs the harmonic analysis approach to identify the
type of current that flow in the protected transformer. There been different algorithms to carry out the harmonic analysis,
among these algorithms, Sine Cosine correlations, Rectangular Transform, Discrete Fourier Transform DFT, Least Square
Method, Walsh Function, Harr Function and Kalman filtering Techniques etc. The wavelet Packets (WPT) algorithm
approach for determining different types of currents for power t r a n s f o r m e r is evaluated by the authors Iswadi HR
et al [5], the use of WPT as feature extraction naturally emphasizes the difference between fault, non-fault and inrush
currents as generated by MATLAB/SIMULINK, since their frequencies are very different. The results of simulation
showed that the algorithm successfully distinguish between fault, non-fault and magnetizing inrush currents condition in
less than 1/5 cycle. The classification scheme is powerful and need simple calculation.

Mr. Saeed Jajebi et al in their paper [6], presented a combinatorial scheme based on hidden Markov models
(HMM) and wavelet transform (WT) to discriminate between magnetizing inrush currents and internal faults in power
transformers. HMMs are powerful tools for transient classification which compute the maximum likelihood probability
between training and testing data signals for identification. The WT is employed to extract certain features which reduce
the computation burden of HMMs and enhance detection accuracy. The newly extracted feature efficiently discriminated
between faults by different trends. The k-means clustering technique is applied to reduce the training procedure time
investment. Since the discrimination method is based on the probabilistic characteristics of the signals without application
of any deterministic index, more reliable and accurate classification was achieved. Their method is independent of the
selection thresholds. Based on the proposed algorithm a high-speed relay response (a quarter of a cycle) can be achieved.
The suitable performance of their method was demonstrated by simulation of different faults and switching conditions on a
power transformer using PSCAD/EMTDC software.

Some techniques to increase reliability, speed and robustness of existing digital relays are reported in recent
literature. Those techniques are based on Fuzzy logic, ANN approach and adaptive fuzzy-neuro approach. These
developments are discussed in the following section of this paper.

FUZZY LOGIC APPROACH

Fuzzy sets are sets whose elements have degrees of membership. Fuzzy sets were introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh
280 Vinay Barhate

and Dieter Klaua in 1965 as an extension of the classical notion of set for dealing with uncertainty of events. It was first
introduced in 1979 for solving power system problems [7]. Accordingly, fuzzy set theory can be considered as a
generalization of a classical set theory. In this theory, an element of the universe either belongs to or does not belongs to
the set. Thus, the degree of association of an element is crisp.

In fuzzy set theory, the association of an element can be continuously varying. Mathematically, a fuzzy set is a
mapping (known as membership function) from the universe of discourse to the closed interval {0,1}. Since fuzzy logic
uses heuristic knowledge, expert knowledge and experience, it is very useful mathematical tool, to solve the decision
making problems. Thus, fuzzy sets become a very powerful mathematical tool to describe quantitatively uncertain values
and relations between them.

It is found that after 1990, researches have developed differential power transformer protection using fuzzy logic
concept. One of the paper in 2009 authored by Ahmad Abdulkader Aziz et el [8], reports that second harmonic frequency
component under magnetizing inrush condition in modern transformers has been decreased considerably due to the
improvement in core steel due to this, traditional approaches are likely to mal operate in case of magnetizing inrush with
low second harmonic component.

This paper reports fuzzy based algorithm consisting flux differential current derivative curve, harmonic restraint
and percentage differential characteristic curve. The following advantages can be concluded from the papers mentioned
above on fuzzy logic based approach: That the fuzzy based relaying algorithm prevents mal operation of relay in the event
of magnetizing inrush with low second harmonic component and internal faults with high second harmonic component.
This results in improved accuracy and robustness against the change of condition in power system. And also the Relays
obtain high sensitivity to the fault detection and operate with tripping time of within half cycle. Hence, the method is
reliable and speedy.

Mr. Iman Sefari Rad and et al , in one of their paper[9], used fuzzy logic for internal fault detection in differential
protection of power transformers. In that method of protection, algorithm of fault detection is based on ruling out non-
internal fault phenomena. For internal fault detection, it considered some criteria for inrush current, over excitation,
saturation of current transformers and mismatch of current transformers and is defined appropriate membership functions
and criteria signals. After testing, it has been found that, this method has good accuracy and confidence. Simulation results
showed that protective system operates correctly in fault and non-fault cases and fuzzy system is able to detect occurrence
of fault in less than half a cycle and the method improves protection system satisfactorily.

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Another most powerful mathematical tool of recent times is Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) which attracts the
researchers to tackle the transformer protection problem. Dr Horward Silver in his session published in proceedings [10],
mentioned that the characteristic feature of ANN is that once it is trained for any specific purpose, then it responds to new
events in the most appropriate manner given the experiences gained during the training process. The ANN model can be
determined by its network architecture, transfer function and its learning rule shown in Figure 2.

The objective of ANN training is to get minimum deviation between the targeted outputs and the actual outputs.
The criteria function for sum square error is minimizing according to gradient rule. The effectiveness of ANN depends on
the quality of training given. In ANN, for transformer protection problem, pattern reorganization based on waveform
analysis method is used to train the network.
A Review of Distinguishing Schemes for Power Transformer’s Magnetizing Inrush and Fault Currents 281

Figure 2: An Artificial Neuron

Neural networks can be used to discriminate between magnetizing inrush and internal fault currents based on
wave shape analysis of current signals. Neural networks are trained using feed forward back propagation algorithm. The
number of layers in neural networks is decided accordingly. Advantages are their capability to recognize current
waveforms for various operating conditions of transformers. Many papers are presented in past, only few recent papers are
discussed here.

SR Paraskar et al [11], developed a new method of discriminating magnetizing inrush current from inter-turn
faults in a transformer which is presented in this paper. This paper gives algorithm where statistical parameters of detailed
d1 level wavelet coefficients of signal are used as an input to the artificial neural network (ANN), which develops in to a
novel approach for online detection method to discriminate the magnetizing inrush current and inter-turn fault, and even
the location of fault i.e. whether the inter-turn fault lies in primary winding or secondary winding through the use of
discrete wavelet transform and artificial neural- nets (ANNs). A custom-built single-phase transformer was used in the
laboratory to collect the data from controlled experiments. After the feature extraction using discrete wavelet transform
(DWT), a neural network models MLP has been designed and trained rigorously. Wavelet transform with its inherent time
frequency localization property is employed to extract discriminating features from the differential current. The ANN was
successes in classifying the type of event from the extracted features given as input. The algorithm has been tested
successfully online, by staging these events on the custom built transformer. These events are identified in less than one
cycle after their inception. This classification may occur for situations in which inception angle, fault resistance and
other parameters are very different from those used during the ANN‟s learning. If this is the case, it is necessary to add the
misclassified fault record, to the learning database and retrain the ANN.

Venkatesan and another [12], in their paper work reported and demonstrated the use of an Artificial Neural
Network (ANN) as a pattern classifier for differential relay operation in the protection scheme for power transformer
protection and Symmetrical components as an ANN‟s inputs. The extensive simulation study shows that the
symmetrical components can provide adequate inputs for classification of magnetizing inrush current and internal fault
current. This new approach in differential protection for power transformer based on artificial neural network had shown a
vastly improved performance over conventional techniques.

The back propagation algorithm minimizes an average sum squared error term by doing a gradient descent in the
error space during training. The convergence of the back propagation algorithms during the training is sensitive to the
initial values of weights. The obtained results showed that the proposed ANN-based differential relay represents a proper
action. It can operate with proper sensitivity and even without tap changing effect using an ANN that it is proposed here
solves this problem. Thus, the proposed ANN-based differential relaying for power transformer gives promising
282 Vinay Barhate

security (ability not trip when it should not), dependability (ability to trip when it should), speed of operation (short fault
clearing time).

Under ANN, one strong method to discriminate between inrush and internal fault current is Probabilistic neural
network (PNN) authored by Manoj Tripathy et al [13], the optimal probabilistic neural network (PNN) is proposed as the
core classifier to discriminate between the magnetizing inrush and the internal fault of a power transformer. The particle
swarm optimization is used to obtain an optimal smoothing factor of PNN which is a crucial parameter for PNN. It makes
use of the ratio of voltage-to-frequency and amplitude of differential current for the determination of operating condition of
the transformer.

The performance of the proposed heteroscedastic-type PNN is investigated with the conventional homoscedastic-
type PNN, feed forward back propagation (FFBP) neural network, and the conventional harmonic restraint method. To
evaluate the developed algorithm, relaying signals for various operating condition of the transformer, including internal
and external faults, are obtained by modelling the transformer using PSCAD/EMTDC. In the proposed method, stability of
differential relay is ensured during the magnetizing inrush or sympathetic inrush, over-excitation, and external fault
conditions. Hence, the differential protection reliability is enhanced.

In another paper [14], the same team of authors presents a novel approach, by amalgamation of Probabilistic
Neural Network, PNN and Power Distribution Protection, PDP methods, to enhance discrimination between transformer
internal fault and magnetizing inrush and to classify the type of fault in power transformer.

The PNN is faster than the classical ANNs and easy to design. The reported PNN algorithm is based on wave-
shape identification technique which is independent of amount of harmonic contents of operating signal of relay, and
suitable for modern power transformers that use high-permeability low coercion core materials. With these core materials
high second harmonic components may be generated during internal faults while these components may remain low during
magnetizing inrush, and hence the conventional harmonic restraint technique that uses second harmonic component as the
indicator of magnetizing inrush may fail. As the PDP method monitors the power flow into transformer irrespective of the
harmonic contents of fault currents, and hence is suitable for protection of modern power transformers.

In the proposed hybrid method, stability of differential relay is ensured during the magnetizing inrush,
sympathetic inrush, over-excitation and external fault conditions. The combination of PDP method with PNN makes it
capable to detect light internal faults (turn-to-turn faults) for all ratings of transformers which improve the overall
performance of digital differential protection scheme.

In addition to that the hybrid method is intelligent, reliable and capable to take decision even in case of fluctuating
ratio of second harmonic to fundamental of differential current unlike the conventional harmonic method. Real time
implementation of differential relaying using the proposed algorithm applying PNN as the core classifier would essentially
require a PNN processor and it is matter of further research.

FUZZY - NEURO APPROACH

In the field of artificial intelligence, Neuro-fuzzy refers to combinations of artificial neural networks and fuzzy
logic. Neuro-fuzzy was proposed by J. S. R. Jang. Neuro-fuzzy hybridization results in a hybrid intelligent system that
synergizes these two techniques by combining the human-like reasoning style of fuzzy systems with the learning
and connectionist structure of neural networks shown in Fig. 3. Neuro-fuzzy hybridization is widely termed as Fuzzy
Neural Network (FNN) or Neuro-Fuzzy System (NFS) in the literature
A Review of Distinguishing Schemes for Power Transformer’s Magnetizing Inrush and Fault Currents 283

Figure 3: Hybrid Fuzzy Neural Network

In some papers, the architecture of adaptive fuzzy network has been utilized. H. Khorashdi-Zadeh et al [15], in
their work presented a new inrush detector algorithm for differential protection of power transformer based on the fuzzy-
neuro method. Recently, the frequency environment of power systems has been made more complicated and the magnitude
of the second harmonic in inrush current has been decreased because of the improvement of cast steel. Therefore,
traditional approaches will likely mal-operate in the case of magnetizing inrush with low second component and
internal faults with high second harmonic. In this paper, the results show that the proposed fuzzy-neuro based inrush
detector represents a proper action. It can operate with proper sensitivity and even when internal faults with CT saturation
occur. Thus, the use of fuzzy-neuro can make it possible to extend the use of reliable and sensitive differential relays to
power transformer protection.

Tripathy et el[16] in their continuous work on the subject matter authored earlier that a approach based on Fuzzy-
neuro techniques ensures relay stability against external faults, magnetizing inrush, sympathetic inrush , over excitation
conditions and its operation on internal faults. It uses FBPNN, a Fuzzy Back Proposition Neural Network as a core
classifier to discriminate and it uses an optimal number of layers and Neurons in each layers. It is hybrid intelligent system
used for digital Differential Power Transformer protection which includes merits of ANN and Fuzzy systems.

In general, fuzzy sets and neural networks deal efficiently with the two very distinct areas of information
processing. Fuzzy sets are good at various aspects of uncertain knowledge representation, while fuzzy-neuro is an efficient
structure capable of learning from examples. Both techniques have their advantages and disadvantages, and they can also
be complementary.

CONCLUSIONS

A literature survey of Transformer protection which is critical issue in power system as the issue lies in the
accurate and rapid discrimination of magnetizing inrush current from internal fault current is done through this paper. This
paper has taken a review and summarises the application of various Artificial Intelligence techniques. The recent
mathematical tool of Fuzzy logic and ANN approach seems to be more accurate, reliable, fast and robust than the
conventional methods. It is concluded that these methods are much better than the classical methods.

REFERENCES

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2. Abdolmutaleb Abou-Safe and Gordon Kettleborough, “Modelling and Calculating the In-Rush Currents in Power
Transformers” Damascus Univ. Journal Vol. (21)-No. (1)2005
284 Vinay Barhate

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