PLC Based Transformer Monitoring & Protection System

Abstract

Pakistan is currently facing huge hurdles to maintain round the clock supply of electric power in the major areas. This makes more annoying when a short fall increase by the failure of the power transmissions and even this increases more in summer season when due to overload and high-level environmental effects of heat power transformers failure rate increases numerously. The transformers being damaged due to the over heat and high load across one or two of its three phases. Mismanagement of the power distribution causes most of the problems when a heavy power load observed on single phase whereas other phases were not equally loaded. The system design will provide a systematic solution to protect transformer and fault detection using PLC, phase monitoring and temperature sensing with power management of particular distribution and give notification through GSM and information sharing with control room/Grid station through Internet of Things (IoT). In case of overloading and heating the system will automatically cutoff the breakers of load, which will help to save the life of transformer. The operator in control room is only required to monitor updates from system regularly, to achieve real time data acquisition through GSM technology, which is adopted to update in time. The prime aspect of this solution is efficiently handling of the system load while maintaining the equipment in good condition. The protection schemes so far designed can successfully protect the transformer and mitigate the risk of enormous destruction caused by transformer explosion, protecting major and expensive power system equipment and human life.