Experimental measurements of fault level for Sceco West, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract EN

The fault level represents the maximum short circuit current that a power system causes to flow to the point of short circuit.

Due to change of network configuration, the fault level at any point of the power system network changes accordingly.

It is not practical to apply full short circuit on the system in order to determine the fault level.

This paper describes scheme for continuous measuring of the fault level at any point of the power system network.

This scheme is composed of an antiparallel thyristor pair.

The thyristor current, which is controlled by the firing angle, can be used to perform the on-line fault level measurement.

Saudi Consolidated Electric Company (SCECO) West network has been simulated in the lab and the invented scheme has been applied to the network to measure the short circuit currents.

The comparison between the measured and calculated short circuit currents shows results with high accuracy.