A practical circuit breaker monitoring system

Circuit breaker monitoring can provide with condition information of circuit breaker, which can be used in making system operating decisions to maintain reliability of service and determine the required maintenance to prevent circuit breaker failures. In this paper, a simple and economical circuit breaker condition monitoring system is proposed. This system can be extended to the condition monitoring for numerous circuit breakers in the industrial distribution system. Circuit breaker time, which can reflect the condition of component most liable to fault, is detected with normal operational data and can be recorded with digital fault recorder and numerical relay. This concept proposed in this paper is verified with field data to show its practicality.