Module 4 Fault Tracing

Fault Tracing and its Importance:

Fault reporting is a maintenance concept that increases operational availability and that
reduces operating cost through three mechanisms.
1. Reduce labor-intensive diagnostic evaluation
2. Eliminate diagnostic testing down-time
3. Provide notification to management for degraded operation
This is a prerequisite for Condition-based maintenance.
In industries, Electrical faults can sometimes be small and fairly unimportant, but often they
have the potential to be very dangerous. If you are noticing problems with your sockets,
circuits or lighting, you shouldn’t hesitate to call a qualified electrician to carry out a fault
finding operation. If you ignore such issues, they could pose a danger to your health, and in
some cases can be life threatening.
The general steps in Fault tracing process are;
1. Analyse the symptoms to determine what the fault could be
2. Carry out tests to identify the exact fault
3. Explain the problem and the proposed solution
4. Carry out the repair and make sure that the premises are safe again.
Decision Trees Concept:
A decision tree is a map of the possible outcomes of a series of related choices. It allows an
individual or organization to weigh possible actions against one another based on their costs,
probabilities, and benefits.
As the name goes, it uses a tree-like model of decisions. They can be used either to drive
informal discussion or to map out an algorithm that predicts the best choice mathematically.
A decision tree typically starts with a single node, which branches into possible outcomes. Each
of those outcomes leads to additional nodes, which branch off into other possibilities. This
gives it a tree-like shape.
There are three different types of nodes: chance nodes, decision nodes, and end nodes. A chance
node, represented by a circle, shows the probabilities of certain results. A decision node,
represented by a square, shows a decision to be made, and an end node shows the final outcome
of a decision path.
Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to
help and identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal, but are also a popular tool in machine
learning.
 Fig: Example of Decision Tree.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Decision Trees
Advantages:

 Decision trees generate understandable rules.

 Decision trees perform classification without requiring much computation.
 Decision trees are capable of handling both continuous and categorical variables.
 Decision trees provide a clear indication of which fields are most important for
prediction or classification.
 The cost of using the tree to predict data decreases with each additional data point.

Disadvantages:

 Decision trees are less appropriate for estimation tasks where the goal is to predict the
value of a continuous attribute.
 Decision trees are prone to errors in classification problems with many class and a
relatively small number of training examples.
 Decision trees can be computationally expensive to train.
 The process of growing a decision tree is computationally expensive.
 Calculations can become complex when dealing with uncertainty and lots of linked
outcomes.

Causes and Effects of Electrical Faults in Electrical Power System:

Electrical powers system is growing in size and complexity in all sectors such as generation,
transmission, distribution and load systems. Faults in electrical sytem like short circuit
condition in power system network results in severe economic losses and reduces the reliability
of the electrical system.

Electrical fault is an abnormal condition, caused by equipment failures such as transformers

and rotating machines, human errors and environmental conditions. Theses faults cause
interruption to electric flows, equipment damages and even cause death of humans, birds and
animals.
Causes of Electrical Faults:

1. Weather Conditions:

It includes lighting strikes, heavy rains, heavy winds, salt deposition on overhead lines and
conductors, snow and ice accumulation on transmission lines, etc. These environmental
conditions interrupt the power supply and also damage electrical installations.

2. Equipment Failures:

Various electrical equipments like generators, motors, transformers, reactors, switching

devices, etc causes short circuit faults due to malfunctioning, ageing, insulation failure of cables
and winding. These failures result in high current to flow through the devices or equipment
which further damages it.

3. Human Errors:

Electrical faults are also caused due to human errors such as selecting improper rating of
equipment or devices, forgetting metallic or electrical conducting parts after servicing or
maintenance, switching the circuit while it is under servicing, etc.

4. Smoke of Fires:

Ionization of air, due to smoke particles, surrounding the overhead lines results in spark
between the lines or between conductors to insulator. This flashover causes insulators to lose
their insulting capacity due to high voltages.

Effects of Electrical Faults:

1. Over Current Flow:

When fault occurs it creates a very low impedance path for the current flow. This results in a
very high current being drawn from the supply, causing tripping of relays, damaging insulation
and components of the equipments.

2. Danger to Operating Personnel:

Fault occurrence can also cause shocks to individuals. Severity of the shock depends on the
current and voltage at fault location and even may lead to death.

3. Loss of Equipment:

Heavy current due to short circuit faults result in the components being burnt completely which
leads to improper working of equipment or device. Sometimes heavy fire causes complete
burnout of the equipments.

4. Disturbs Interconnected Active Circuits:

Faults not only affect the location at which they occur but also disturbs the active
interconnected circuits to the faulted line.
5. Electrical Fires:

Short circuit causes flashovers and sparks due to the ionization of air between two conducting
paths which further leads to fire as we often observe in news such as building and shopping
complex fires.

Electrical Fault Limiting Devices:

It is possible to minimize causes like human errors, but not environmental changes. Fault
clearing is a crucial task in power system network. If we manage to disrupt or break the circuit
when fault arises, it reduces the considerable damage to the equipments and also property.

Some of these fault limiting devices include fuses, circuit breakers, relays, etc. and are
discussed below.

1. Fuse:

It is the primary protecting device. It is a thin wire enclosed in a casing or glass which connects
two metal parts. This wire melts when excessive current flows in circuit. Type of fuse depends
on the voltage at which it is to operate. Manual replacement of wire is necessary once it
blowout.

2. Circuit breaker:

It makes the circuit at normal as well as breaks at abnormal conditions. It causes automatic
tripping of the circuit when fault occurs. It can be electromechanical circuit breaker like
vacuum / oil circuit breakers etc, or ultrafast electronic circuit breaker.

3. Relay:

It is condition based operating switch. It consists of magnetic coil and normally open and closed
contacts. Fault occurrence raises the current which energizes relay coil, resulting in the contacts
to operate so the circuit is interrupted from flowing of current. Protective relays are of different
types like impedance relays, mho relays, etc.

4. Lighting power protection devices:

These include lighting arrestors and grounding devices to protect the system against lighting
and surge voltages.