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Issue 29 - December 1999
As January 1, 2000 approaches, some customers may have questions as to Beckwith’s readiness for Y2K. The term "Year 2000" refers to certain problems that may arise due to the manner in which a piece of equipment stores and uses date information, and typically concerns dates following December 31, 1999. Beckwith Electric has tested its product lines that have real-time clocks along with the associated communications and analysis software programs. Test results have confirmed that the product lines and the associated communications and analysis software programs will correctly "rollover" to the year 2000. Those products, communications software and analysis software programs that indicate the last two digits of the year will display "00". Those products, communications software and analysis software programs that indicate four digits for the year will display "2000". It should be noted that the use and reporting of time and date data is for information purposes only. Time and date data has no effect on the safe and reliable operation of the products, communications software and analysis software programs. Interested? For more information, contact Beckwith Electric at (727) 544-2326 or e-mail at marketing@beckwithelectric.com.
Beckwith Relays Provide Protection in Brazil
As the largest nation in South America and a population of over 160 million, Brazil is Latin America’s largest electricity consumer and the fourth largest electricity market in the world. Even with an annual per capita consumption of 1,593 kilowatts/hour, Brazil was facing increasing demands for more power. It was Companhia Paranaense de Energia (COPEL) who responded to those demands with the construction of a $1 billion hydroelectric facility that revitalized Brazil’s power supply while incorporating the use of Beckwith Electric’s M-3430 Integrated Protection System®. COPEL is the electric utility for the Brazilian State of Paraná. It is one of three large utilities formerly controlled by the government. With 18 generation plants and more than 3,300 megawatts of installed generation capacity to more than 2.6 million customers, COPEL is the leading supplier of power throughout the south, southeast and midwest regions of Brazil. In January 1995, COPEL began initial excavation for its 1,240-MW Salto Caxias Hydroelectric Project. In four years, the first of four generating units at the Salto Caxias Hydroelectric Power Station went into commercial operation. As of October 1999, the remaining three 310-MW turbine generators have entered commercial operation and have the capacity to generate 30% of the energy consumption of the State of Paraná. With generators that support such a significant percentage of a state’s power supply, COPEL wanted to ensure proper operation by providing redundant protection for each of the four generators. However, they wanted to use protection relays from two different manufacturers. Beckwith became aware of COPEL’s protection needs and contacted them. In the beginning of 1998, Beckwith sold and shipped five M-3430 Integrated Protection System relays to COPEL for their Salto Caxias Hydroelectric Plant. Beckwith engineers traveled to Brazil for commissioning and testing of the relays, and four relays have been put into commercial service while one relay is a spare. COPEL was initially impressed with Beckwith’s user-friendly software, but quickly discovered the quality performance offered by the M-3430 Protection System. Gilmar Francisco Krefta, a Senior Protection Engineer at COPEL, expressed: The M-3430 Generator Protection System produced by Beckwith Electric that was applied at the Caxias power plant is a useful protection system for generators. Whatever you expect from a relay, to cover the problems that you can imagine, you will find in this generator protection system. It just shows the actual experience in generator performance of those who developed this integrated protection system for generators. COPEL’s challenge was to satisfy the rising demands for power in Brazil. The result was a cost-effective hydroelectric project that took advantage of advanced technologies in hydroelectric generation. As a result, the Salto Caxias Hydropower Station will assure decades of reliable, low-cost electricity; Beckwith Electric’s Integrated Protection Systems will be part of that assurance. Interested? For more information, contact Beckwith Electric at (727) 544-2326 or e-mail at marketing@beckwithelectric.com.
In January 1997, Beckwith Electric formed a Customer Service Group within the Quality Assurance Department in order to meet growing needs for customer service activity. This group is responsible for all maintenance, upgrade, modification, repair, and technical support of Beckwith products. Faced with increasing product complexity and the loss of technical personnel throughout the power utility industry, this group has continually met the goal of improving customer service and reducing response times. Customer Service Group Members Charlie Stininger, Customer Service Technician, is responsible for product enhancements, modification, maintenance and repair. Charlie has several years of experience in testing and quality assurance. Prior to joining Beckwith Electric, he led the group responsible for testing production material and prototypes at Leland Electrosystems in Erie, Pennsylvania. Charlie has an A.S. degree in electronic engineering technology from the Erie Institute of Technology. Bob Schuyler, Customer Service Representative, is responsible for interfacing with the customers on all service issues, including responding to customer phone calls and conducting on-site service calls when required. Bob also acts as an interdepartmental liaison, following up on customer service issues with application engineers, product engineers, test and repair technicians and others, to "close the loop" and ensure that all issues are resolved satisfactorily.
Mark Dixon was recently appointed as the Manager for Autodaptive® Systems. He will be responsible for the marketing, sales and technical support of Beckwith Electric's line of Autodaptive® Systems and products, including the M-2501A Capacitor Control, the M-2667 LTC Tapchanger Control and the M-2600 line of regulator tapchanger controls. Mark has several years of marketing and sales experience in the power industry, some of which involved international markets. Most recently, he was a senior application engineer in substation automation with Siemens Power Transmission & Distribution. Mark also spent over thirteen years with Basler Electric in various sales and marketing positions. Mark has an A.S. degree in electronics, an A.A. degree in business and has completed additional coursework in protective relaying engineering, business management and economics. He was a specialist in electrical power production engineering with the U.S. Air Force and is a member of IEEE.
Beckwith Electric has purchased new equipment that allows the Manufacturing Department to produce high-quality printed circuit boards with reduced effort and time. Over four year ago, Beckwith Electric purchased a surface-mount machine—a Zevatech PM570. This machine places small chip capacitors and resistors as large as two inches, with a lead spacing as fine as 20 mil pitch at a speed of 3600 placements per hour. Along with this machine, Beckwith Electric also purchased software, developed by Unicam, for generating programs that optimized the feeder locations on the pick and place machine while reducing programming time. Prior to this purchase, the components were all placed and soldered by hand—a time-consuming process. In 1999, a second Zevatech placement machine was purchased for the pick and placement of Ball Grid Array components. Beckwith Electric had been using a manual solder paste stencil machine that required a lot of naked-eye accuracy as well as manual consistency to apply the paste. Due to increased volumes of board assemblies in 1999, Beckwith recently purchased a Dek 248 stencil machine for applying paste to the boards. This machine has full vision capabilities and semi-automated operation. It replaces the manual solder paste stencil machine with more accurate and efficient automated operations. All the operator needs to do is load and unload the printed circuit board. Beckwith also uses a Vitronics eight-zone oven for reflowing the solder paste. This oven has the capability to profile the different zones for process controls. With this new equipment, one operator can run the entire Surface Mount Technology (SMT) line for producing a completed SMT board assembly. The new equipment has reduced assembly time by about one-third and has increased the quality of the finished boards. Beckwith Electric is evaluating other SMT processes to expand capabilities for the upcoming year including the addition of an optical vision center for improved inspection of completed board assemblies. Beckwith Electric also expects to add a second Dek 248 screen printer, a new convection oven for reflowing, and equipment for processing and inspecting Ball Grid Arrays.
by Chuck Mozina, Manager of Application Engineering for Protection and Protection Systems Various Powerlines articles over the past few years have highlighted the Beckwith products for generator and transformer protection. These multifunction digital relays are part of Beckwith’s Integrated Protection Systems® (IPS) or family of protection products which provide very cost-effective protection for power plants. This article describes overall power plant protection/synchronizing and discusses the level of redundancy that is generally accepted for the protection of utility-sized generating plants. It also highlights the substantial space and cost savings of fully-integrated digital power plant protection and synchronizing. Beckwith is proud to have played a major role in pioneering the use of digital technology in power plant protection. New Power Plants In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, limited new generation was installed resulting in the today’s historically low level of reserve margins of power generation. At the same time, deregulation of the U.S. utility industry resulted in IPP (Independent Power Producers) providing a large part of the needed new capacity required to meet the current and future demands. Most of the new large generating plants were "packaged" gas turbines in the 100-350 MW range. In many cases, these new gas turbines were part of a combined cycle plant where the exhaust heat of one or two gas turbines provided a heat source for a single steam generator to increase overall heat cycle efficiency. These multi-machine plants are generally referred to as "power blocks"; they are becoming the way major blocks of generation are being added to U.S. utility systems. One of the reasons these plants can be installed at very reasonable dollar/megawatt costs is that the protection/synchronizing is typically standardized using fully integrated digital systems. These systems have four or five panels of electromechanical/static discrete relays that can be replaced with two panels of standardized digital protection for the generator, step-up transformer (GSU) and auxiliary/start-up transformer. The Typical Overall Power Plant Protection One-Line illustrates such an installation. A third panel is generally provided for generator synchronizing as shown in the Power Plant Relay Panel Layout. Beckwith Electric has helped several major gas turbine manufacturers make the transition from discrete electromechanical/static relays to modern digital integrated protection systems. Upgrading Older Generating Plants As existing power plants have aged, many utilities have embarked on "life extension" programs as an alternative to decommissioning and installing new generation. Factors such as high maintenance, in-service failures and lack of spare parts have caused utilities to replace their existing power plant protection and synchronizing. A second and very important factor, recognized by many utilities, is the need to upgrade protection to meet current industry standards as outlined in IEEE/ANSI C37.102. These protection upgrades fall into three major categories: Improved Sensitivity in protection areas where older relaying does not provide the level of detection required to prevent damages. Examples of protection in this area are:
New or Additional Protection Areas that 30 years ago were not perceived to be a problem, but operating experiences have proved otherwise. These areas are:
Special Protection Application Considerations that are unique to generators. These areas include:
When upgrading power plant protection and synchronizing, functions and panel layout look very similar to those in the figures in this article, except that the CT and VT architecture of specific plants may require that primary and back-up protection share common CT and VT inputs. The compactness of digital protection results in considerable space savings and space is always at a premium in upgrade projects. Beckwith Electric has helped many major utilities that have a variety of prime movers such as steam, hydro and combustion cycle, develop their upgrade programs. For more information, download the technical paper entitled "Upgrading Generator Protection Using Digital Technology" from our web site at www.beckwithelectric.com or see the Publications Request coupon on page 3. Protection Redundancy Issues Providing redundant protection for major generator and GSU transformers has become a common practice within the industry for utility-sized generators. This practice has also been adopted by most gas turbine manufacturers. This level of redundancy, shown in the one-line figure is sufficient to allow the generator to remain in service if one relay system should fail. If a major generator is forced off-line due to a relay failure, the utility/generator owner will have to either generate from less efficient machines or buy more expensive power off-system. Either action will result in higher production costs of over $100,000 a day for the loss of a moderately-sized utility generator. Given these costs, the addition of a second relay is prudent even with MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rates of 100 years or longer. The simultaneous failure of both relays is extremely rare. Even with two digital relays, the installation cost is generally less than half the cost of discrete static or electromechanical protection costs, due to reduced panel space and wiring cost savings. The design of the self-diagnostic failure detection in Beckwith Electric multifunction relays is such that if a failure is detected, the relay will automatically take itself out of service and close its alarm output contact. The self-diagnostics is designed to remove the relay from service without tripping, allowing continued operation with backup protection. Protection of Power Plant Transformers Protection of the GSU and auxiliary/start-up transformers at power plants presents some special protection problems. Power plant transformers are susceptible to overexcitation due to high voltage or low frequency. This condition is detected with a V/Hz (24) relay. Providing this protection within the transformer zone allows VT inputs to be provided from the primary of the GSU (see one-line figure) which is where industry standards (IEEE/ANSI C57.12) specify the allowable V/Hz levels. This is a substantial improvement over providing this protection from V/Hz relays on the generator terminals. The 59N relay within the transformer protective zone provides ground fault protection when the generator is out-of-service (indicated by "52 Gen open" in the one-line figure). When the generator is out-of-service, the GSU transformer remains in-service to supply the auxiliary transformer, which acts as a start-up supply for the generator. For this operating condition, ground fault protection needs to be provided in the zone between the generator breaker and the GSU transformer. This is a common problem on new gas turbine installations and at older hydro generator plants. This protection is provided by a broken delta VT connection which supplies voltage to a 59N relay within the M-3310 as shown in the one-line diagram. To reduce ground fault damage, auxiliary transformers are typically grounded on their secondary winding with a grounding resistor that limits ground fault current as shown in the figure. This type of grounding also reduces the ground fault current within the secondary-winding transformer-differential zone. This current can be below the threshold of operation of the traditional 87T transformer differential relay. High-speed protection can be provided by use of a product-type ground differential relay 87GD within the M-3310. The Beckwith Electric M-3310 Transformer Relay has been specifically designed with functions such as those described above for power plant applications. Generator Synchronizing Quick, reliable and fast synchronizing of a generator to the power system requires minimization of the following parameters: Frequency difference—the difference between the two sources, often referred to as "slip"; Voltage difference—the difference in voltage magnitudes between the two sources; Phase angle difference—the difference in phase angle between the voltages of the two sources. Failure to properly match these conditions can result in excessive generator-turbine shaft torque damaging the unit. Beckwith’s synchronizing system (M-0193B, M-0194 and M-0188A) automatically calculates the proper advanced closing, based on breaker time and slip frequency, and then verifies that both voltages are within the upper and lower voltage limits and voltage differences are also within allowable safe limits. Control of the governor and voltage regulator using proportional pulse width control, invented by Beckwith, ensures quick synchronizing of all types of prime movers without over/under shoot. The M-0193B is the synchronizer, the M-0194 is the generator control and the M-0188A is a sync-check that provides backup protection. Beckwith synchronizers are installed on some of the world’s largest and most important generators. System Integration As previously mentioned, many protection upgrade projects are part of larger life extensions or automation efforts within a power plant. One of the important features of digital relays is their communication capability. All Beckwith relays have three serial ports. Two serial interface ports, COM1 and COM2, are standard 9-pin RS232 DET-configured ports. One of these—the front panel COM1 port— is used to locally set and interrogate the relay by computer via IPScom® Communications Software. The second RS-232 port, COM2, is provided at the rear of the unit. An RS-485 configured port, COM3, is also available at the rear terminal block of the unit. Either rear-panel port, COM2 or COM3, can be used to set and interrogate the relay via a DCS (Distributed Control System) using the MODBUS Protocol. Beckwith relays are addressable and do not require an external communication router. Typically, metering quantities (such as megawatts, megaVArs, volts, amps, power factor) and target information are accessed via the DCS for remote display. Use of the relay to provide this information substantially reduces wiring costs and eliminates dedicated transducers for metering. With over 4000 digital power plant relays in service, and almost 1800 synchronizing controls in service, Beckwith Electric leads the industry in experience for power plant protection and synchronizing needs. We have addressed many unique power plant application problems with our products and have pioneered the use of digital relaying within power plants. Interested? For more information, contact Beckwith Electric at (727) 544-2326 or e-mail at marketing@beckwithelectric.com.
Beckwith Electric no longer offers the following product models, associated accessories and auxiliary devices as of October 1, 1999. According to Lew Roberson, VP of Marketing, this action was necessary due to the lack of availability of major components within these products. Each discontinued model, however, has a suitable replacement product that uses the most current technology and components, and offers users added functions, features, benefits and price advantages.
Beckwith Electric honors all outstanding commitments for the discontinued models. In addition, we maintain an inventory of major components to provide repair services for these models. In lieu of repair, we also offer a trade-in value toward the purchase price of a replacement model. Interested? For more information, contact Beckwith Electric at (727) 544-2326 or e-mail at marketing@beckwithelectric.com.
Articles from Issue 29, December 1999 of Beckwith Electric's Powerlines. |
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Manager
for Autodaptive® Systems Appointed