Mitigation of sympathetic tripping leveraging on IEC 61850 protocol

Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) diagnose faults and traffic issues of data packets in a reliable and efficient manner in a substation environment. These devices determine abnormal system condition, wide area disturbances offering greater flexibility to the operator in terms of condition monitoring and diagnostics. In a distribution system, end user get multiple faults in the network and one such nuisance disruption of power on a faulty feeder results in sympathetic tripping. Sympathetic tripping occurs during high load conditions causing entire protection system to spuriously trip due to an out of section fault. Occurrence of such faults could be attributed to load unbalance in the distribution feeders, delayed voltage recovery conditions, voltage swell/sag in the feeders etc. Usually, this phenomenon occur when loads containing low inertia rotating equipment are connected to distribution feeders. In this paper, an Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET) is used to simulate, mitigate faults attributed to Sympathetic Tripping in a laboratory environment.