IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO.

1, JANUARY 2005 535

Protective Device Coordination Enhancement for Motor Starting Programs

David C. Yu, Haijun Liu, Hongbo Sun, Shuai Lu, and Christopher McCarthy

Abstract—This paper presents an enhancement to motor

starting simulation programs which allows them to analyze the
motor starting effects on system protective devices. According to a
given relay’s operating principle, a method is presented to deter-
mine if it will trip by comparing the accumulated energy during
the motor starting to the energy needed to trip the relay based
on its time current characteristics curve. Under special circum-
stances, motor starting can cause nuisance tripping of protective
devices. Hence, the protective device coordination enhancement
presented here can be a useful addition to motor-starting simula-
tion programs. Fig. 2. Motor starting current versus time curve.
Index Terms—Motor starting, protective device coordination,
time current characteristics.

I. INTRODUCTION

D URING startup, a motor draws several times its full

load current and causes sudden voltage sag in its ter-
minal/neighbor buses. This could result in problems such
as speed variation of other motors, and nuisance tripping of
protective devices, etc.
A significant amount of research [2]–[4] has been conducted
on large motors starting effects, and several motor starting sim-
ulation programs are commercially available in the power in-
Fig. 1. Example TCC curve.
dustry. However, most of these efforts have not analyzed and
simulated the motor-starting effects on distribution system pro-
tective devices, which may trip under some circumstances as the relay will trip, if constant current sustains beyond time
discussed in the example given later. Hence, additional func- . The current results from motor-starting simulations can be
tionality is needed in motor-starting programs to predict if the used with the TCC curve to predict the relay status.
protective devices will stay closed during motor start. A method A typical curve showing the increase in current during motor
for checking motor-starting effects on protection devices is pre- starting is shown in Fig. 2.
sented in this paper. An example where the nuisance tripping Relays have one of two different resetting modes. Therefore,
does occur is used to demonstrate the application of the method. two different algorithms are presented to determine the status of
the relay during motor starting.
II. METHOD
Relays, fuses, and circuit breakers (CBs) are protective A. Ideal Resetting
devices commonly used in distribution system to protect the Most solid-state or microprocessor relays have the ability to
system and equipment from damage by high currents. This instantaneously reset the overcurrent timing characteristic when
discussion uses a relay as an example; however, the method is the current drops below . A time accumulator is used to
similar with other devices. The operation of a relay depends on determine the status of a relay based on the following steps:
the current magnitude and its sustained time, represented by the 1) accumulator starts once the current value exceeds ;
time-current characteristics (TCC) curve. Fig. 1 shows a TCC 2) average current and the accumulated time in Fig. 2 at any
curve of a Cooper Power Systems Edison-Pro microprocessor time is calculated as follows:
relay. is the relay pickup current, and is the relay
maximum tolerable current. The point indicates that
and
Manuscript received November 3, 2003. Paper no. PESL-00131-2003.
D. C. Yu, H. Liu, H. Sun, and S. Lu are with the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI (1)
53211 USA (e-mail: yu@uwm.edu; hliu@uwm.edu; hbsun@uwm.edu; where
shuailu@uwm.edu). accumulated time;
C. McCarthy is with Cooper Power System, South Milwaukee, WI 53172
(e-mail: cmccarthy@cooperpower.com). accumulator starting time;
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.839737 branch current during motor startup.
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
536 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2005

Fig. 4. Example diagram.

Fig. 3. Two-motor sequential start current curve.

3) with the average current known, the corre-

sponding trip time is obtained from the relay’s TCC
curve;
4) the relay status at time can be determined by comparing
the accumulated time to the corresponding trip time
. The relay status at time t is Fig. 5. Current drawn by the motor during startup.

Tripped if
Not Tripped if
5) accumulator will be instantaneously stopped and reset to
zero if the relay senses that branch current is less than
at any point in time. Otherwise, if high current is still
present, repeat Steps 2 through 5.
B. Nonideal Resetting
Due to their mechanical nature, electromechanical relays are
reset to an initial status only when the average current drops
below the pickup current, not just the instantaneous current. So,
Step 5 of the previous algorithm must be changed to consider
whether has dropped below . A. The exact value can be calculated using (1). From the TCC
Another variation from the ideal resetting is the way to cal-
culate at time
(2)
where, as before, is the accumulator starting time, and
is the branch current during startup.
The branch current shown in Fig. 3 is an example of a non-
ideal resetting potentially resulting in a nuisance trip operation.
The current curve for two sequentially started motors makes
positive contributions to the average current during the intervals
and , while the interval has a negative con-
tribution. It is possible that the cumulative effect of could
result in a trip condition even though starting either motor inde-
pendently would not result in a trip.
III. EXAMPLE
An example is used to demonstrate the simulation of motor-
starting effects on protective devices.
In Fig. 4, the source has equal positive–, negative-, and zero-
sequence impedance of . The line has a positive-
and negative-sequence impedance of and the zero-
sequence impedance is . device coordination enhancement to motor-starting simulation
The motor is a 2.3-kV, 500-hp single-cage induction motor.
The stator and rotor circuit impedance is . system protective devices and help to avoid nuisance operations.
For the protection device of the line, Cooper Power Systems’
Edison-Pro microprocessor relay is chosen. The ground CT ratio
is set to 100:1 and IEC Curve A is used.
The minimum single-line-to-ground fault at Bus 2 is 546 A.
For the chosen relay, a tap setting of 5 is reasonable, resulting in
a minimum pickup current, or , of 500 A. Fig. 1 also shows
the TCC curve of the relay in the above setting.
Motor-starting simulation with the classic method [1] gives
the instantaneous starting current curve as shown in Fig. 5. The
initial motor start current is close to 700 A, which is greater
than . So the time accumulator will start. In this simple case
where an “across the line” start is used, the motor current curve
during startup has a nearly flat peak. So is more than 600
curve, associated with 600 A is slightly more than 1 s. The
peak current will sustain for about 3 s. Since , the
relay will trip during startup.
When relay misoperation is predicted, it is usually not an
option to raise the relay pickup current, since the relay must
be able to trip when the minimum single-line-to-ground fault
occurs. Hence, different starting methods, such as reduced
voltage starting for squirrel cage motors and the varying rotor
external resistance method for wound rotor motors, can be used
to reduce the average startup current. Choosing different motor
types, such as a double-cage motor or changing the load torque
pattern, can also achieve the reduced starting current. Most of
the motor starting programs allow experimentation with the
different options to determine an acceptable solution.
IV. CONCLUSION
A method for studying the effect of motor starting on distri-
bution system protective devices is presented in this paper. Ac-
cording to a relay’s operating principle, this method compares
the accumulated energy during motor starting to the energy to
trip a protective device based on its TCC curve to determine if
the device will operate. Two different algorithms are used to
simulate ideal or nonideal resetting. The proposed protective
programs is a useful tool to measure motor starting impact on
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2005 537

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