Students in Irkutsk Build Low-Cost Power Grid Protection System
Fourth-year students at Irkutsk National Research Technical University (IRNITU), Zakhar Gavrilov and Sergey Dobrynin, have developed a prototype stepped overcurrent protection relay based on the Arduino platform. The device protects electrical equipment from short circuits and overloads and costs dozens of times less than comparable industrial systems.
Commercial protective relay terminals are generally unavailable to students because of their high cost and patent restrictions, so the developers built a simple, easy-to-understand prototype themselves. The software implements three independent protection stages with adjustable current thresholds and time delays, ranging from instantaneous operation to three seconds. The device was tested using a RETOM-21 industrial testing system.
The project won third place at a regional science and engineering conference hosted by Samara State Technical University. The developers plan to add ground fault protection and Internet of Things capabilities.
