Ensuring Electrical Safety of a Mountain Quarry by Choosing Selective Relay Protection in the Electrical Networks with the Voltage above 1 kV

Abstract

An important and urgent task is the calculation and choice of selective relay protection, which allows to ensure safe conduct of work in the conditions of mountain quarries. In the work, on the example of mountain quarry, the calculations were carried out for ensuring electrical safety of the consumers in case of emergency modes occurrence due to the appearance of short-circuit currents. At the same time, short-circuit currents in a 6 kV network, maximum current protection and current cut-off were determined, a selectivity map of protection operation was drawn up. Calculations show that with the correct protection settings, the required sensitivity coefficient is ensured in case of the short circuits at any point in the network. The selectivity map of relay protection is drawn up for a normal scheme, in which sectional switches are off at all the voltage levels. The inclusion of these switches does not affect the choice of the protection operation current, and only increases the sensitivity coefficient of the current protection and earth-fault protection. When arranging power supply schemes for the consumers, it is recommended: not to connect more than two consumers of EKG-4.6 or PKTP-400/6 type to the feeder supplying EKG-8; do not connect more than four consumers of EKG-4.6 or PKTP-400/6 type to a separate feeder; 6 kV quarry network and the boiler should be powered from different busbar sections of KRU-2 complete switchgear; it is advisable to have a cable network length of at least 5–6 km from one section of 6 kV KRU-2 busbars, which will increase the reliability of protection against single-phase earth-faults.