PROTECTIVE DEVICES
RECLOSER
RECLOSER
Protective Devices
What is protective devices?
A device used to protect equipment, machinery,
components and devices, in electrical and electronic circuit
against short circuit, over current and earth fault is called as
protective devices.
Necessity of Protective Devices
Protective devices are necessary to protect electrical
appliance or equipment against
a)Short Circuit
b)Abnormal variations in the supply voltage
c)Overloading of equipment
d)To protect operator against accidental contact with the
faulty equipment, falling which the operator may get a
severe shock.
Circuit Breaker
A circuit breaker is an automatically operated electrical switch
designed to protect an electrical circuit and integrated device
electronic from damage caused by excess current, typically
resulting from an overload or short circuit. Its basic function is
to interrupt current flow after a fault is detected. Unlike a fuse,
which operates once and then must be replaced, a circuit
breaker can be reset (either manually or automatically) to
resume normal operation. Circuit breakers are made in varying
sizes, from small devices that protect low-current circuits or
individual household appliance, up to large switchgear designed
to protect high voltage circuits feeding an entire city.
RECLOSER
In electric power distribution, a recloser, or autorecloser,
is a circuit breaker equipped with a mechanism that can
automatically close the breaker after it has been opened due
to a fault. Reclosers are used on overhead distribution
systems to detect and interrupt momentary faults. Since
many short-circuits clear themselves, a recloser improves
service continuity on overhead lines by automatically
restoring power to the line after a momentary fault.
RECLOSER
Residential customers in areas fed by affected
overhead power lines can occasionally see the effects of an
autorecloser in action. If the fault affects the customer's own
distribution circuit, they may see one or several brief,
complete outages followed by either normal operation (as
the autorecloser succeeds in restoring power after a
transient fault has cleared) or a complete outage of service
(as the autorecloser exhausts its retries). If the fault is on an
adjacent circuit, the customer may see several brief "dips"
(sags) in voltage as the heavy fault current flows into the
adjacent circuit and is interrupted one or more times.
RECLOSER
A typical manifestation would be the dip, or intermittent
black-out, of domestic lighting during an electrical storm.
Autorecloser action may result in electronic devices losing
time settings, losing data in volatile memory, halting,
restarting, or suffering damage due to power interruption.
Owners of such equipment may need to protect electronic
devices against the consequences of power interruptions and
also power surges.
ADVANTAGES OF RECLOSER
• 1. The first is that reclosers prevent transient short
circuits from triggering prolonged power outages. This
results in better supply continuity to customers.
2. The second benefit is that reclosers restore power
automatically, without requiring an engineering site visit.
A transient short circuit is the type of event that can be
caused, for example, when a branch of a tree momentarily
touches overhead cables as it falls to the ground. Reclosers
handle this type of event much better than circuit breakers.
Typically, power would be restored to customers in a matter of
a few seconds or less. Only if the cause of the short circuit has
not cleared itself would the recloser keep the breaker open
until the cause is manually cleared.
