A New Inrush Current Detection Method Based on Current Lissajous Figure

The sympathetic Inrush current that occurs in series and parallel transformers can cause the creation of two major problems in the protection of power transformers. The main problem is that the peak of the inrush current for this case is more severe rather than common inrush current that the protection system may mal-operate. Besides, when a common protection system is designed for parallel transformers, the line input current, the vector summation of the input currents, will be detected as a single-phase fault that can cause the incorrect operation of the protection system. For this purpose, this paper presents a novel approach based on Lissajous of current signal for detection of inrush current phenomenon. The proposed method detects the faults very quickly; as well as, this method has appropriate operation under noisy conditions, like white Gaussian noise. This method is evaluated using a network consist of 230 to 63 kV parallel transformers with vector group ynd11. The results show that the proposed method performs better than conventional industrial schemes, such as second harmonic, zero-crossing, and waveform analysis method.