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Tie Breaker in Series and Bus duct

NickParker

Electrical
Sep 1, 2017
453
We have a space constraints preventing a long switchboard, so we want to segregate the switchgear by sections Bus A and Bus B as shown in the below figure.
The questions are,
1) The link - to be connected by cables or bus ducts (distance less than 10 meter)
2) Should I have bus tie breaker at the both the ends of Bus-A and Bus-B?

bus duct.JPG
 
Replies continue below

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Busduct or cable tie - depends on the layout. If lay out permits, bus duct is preferred for obvious reasons.
Breaker at both ends or only one end - if the intent is to keep the two busses always tied / treated as a single bus, there is no need to have circuit breakers. Just one disconnector will do.
 
Busduct or cable tie - depends on the layout. If lay out permits, bus duct is preferred for obvious reasons.
Breaker at both ends or only one end - if the intent is to keep the two busses always tied / treated as a single bus, there is no need to have circuit breakers. Just one disconnector will do.
The Bus A and Bus B receives power from their transformer; it is a Main-Tie-Main arrangement; Bus tie always operated in "Normally open" but has momentary parallel for Auto transfer.
 
Using two breakers in series provides additional redundancy in terms of being able to still break bus parallel if one bus tie breaker should fail to open on command during switching. Breaker fail schemes also benefit from having a second breaker.

However, providing two breakers in series obviously increases capital cost as well as incrementally adding to OM&A budgets.

A compromise I have frequently encountered is to have one bus tie breaker and one set of removable links, so that if tie bus maintenance is required, an outage can be taken on the section "bus x removable links x bus tie breaker" to open the removable links. Following this outage, the second bus can be returned to service and the next outage taken on the bus tie section "bus tie breaker x removable links" so as to perform the required work.
 

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