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Primary cause of motor failure is excessive heating, which if sustained over long time periods will result in motor burn out. Over heating also reduces the life of motor. If a motor is continuously over heated by just 10 degrees, its life can get reduced by almost 50%. Over heating normally occurs due to over current, which in turn may be due to over loads or locked rotor condition or low voltage or phase failure or repeat starts or phase unbalance. Bimetallic relays are most economical solution for heating due to over loads. However they suffer from inherent deficiencies like poor accuracy, rigid inverse time characteristics, poor repeatability etc. They are totally insensitive to current unbalance, which is one of the major contributors to over heating in motors. Though the three-phase motor is supposed to be a balanced load, current unbalance occurs frequently in motor feeders due to following: voltage unbalance in the feeder supply phase reversal single phasing Current unbalance in a motor is best represented by the presence of excessive negative sequence component in the motor current. Consequently it is necessary to protect motors against negative sequence .
Single phasing :
Single phasing causes worst kind of unbalance - it produces equal amount of positive and negative sequence components. The prime causes for single phasing are : broken or burn out of connecting leads to motor blown fuses faulty contact in switching element To understand the effect of single phasing in motors, consider the condition shown below . It can be seen that the current in winding C will be larger than that in A and B and consequently it will burn out. Typical currents in the windings are shown below > Motor Current load) 3 phase current 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100 (% of full Lines L1 & L3 80 90 102 120 130 147 165 180 200 222 243 Current in windings when single phasing has oc c ured Winding A&B 50 58 62 70 79 87 95 102 111 120 129 Winding C 108 118 131 147 161 180 198 215 235 258 285
From the above table , we can see that in a motor running at 50% load, on single phasing in L2, the healthy lines L1 and L3 will carry 80% of full load the windings will carry 50% of full load the winding C carries more than twice full load (108%) A thermal over load relay in this case , will not trip since it is seeing only 80% current in healthy lines L1 & L3 while the winding C is already over stressed. This situation gets worse with increasing loads at the time of single phasing A negative sequence calculation would have helped in this case.
Phase reversal :
Phase reversal in a motor can be very dangerous - the motor will run in the opposite direction resulting in severe damage to gear boxes, material flow problems and hazard to operating personnel. Phase reversal in a motor feeder produces a negative sequence of nearly 100% and is well detected by a relay with negative sequence protection.
Considering the above details, it can be easily concluded that a motor protection relay will provide an effective protection to the motor only when it is equipped to measure the negative sequence component level in the motor feeder.