ABB REF615 Feeder Protection and Control

ABB REF615 Feeder Protection and Control

Product overview

ABB REF615 is a specialized feeder intelligent electronic device (IED) designed to provide protection, control, measurement, and monitoring for overhead lines and cable feeders in public substations and industrial power systems (including radial, ring, and mesh distribution networks, with or without distributed generation). It belongs to ABB's Relion ®  The product series is part of the 615 protection and control product series, which features compact and withdrawable unit designs for IEDs. It has been redesigned to fully utilize the potential of the IEC 61850 standard in communication and interoperability between substation automation equipment.

Function and Configuration

Protection functions: covering various types of protection, such as overcurrent protection (including non directional, directional, low, high, instantaneous stages), ground fault protection (including directional, non directional, admittance based, wattmeter based, transient/intermittent, harmonic based, etc.), negative sequence overcurrent protection, phase discontinuity protection, residual overvoltage protection, three-phase thermal protection, circuit breaker failure protection, three-phase surge detector, main trip, arc protection, voltage protection (overvoltage, undervoltage, positive sequence undervoltage, negative sequence overvoltage), frequency protection, etc.

Control functions: including circuit breaker control, isolation switch control, grounding switch control, automatic reclosing, synchronization and energizing checks, etc.

Status monitoring function: including circuit breaker status monitoring, trip circuit supervision, current circuit supervision, fuse fault supervision, etc.

Measurement functions: including disturbance recorder, three-phase current measurement, sequence current measurement, residual current measurement, three-phase voltage measurement, residual voltage measurement, sequence voltage measurement, three-phase power and energy measurement, frequency measurement, etc.

Standard configuration: Provides nine standard configurations: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and J. Different configurations are suitable for different scenarios and have different functions. For example, configuration A is mainly used for isolating and resonant grounding cables and overhead line feeders in distribution networks, while configuration F is mainly used for comprehensive protection and control of asynchronous motors controlled by circuit breakers.

Hardware and Interface

Physical hardware: It consists of a plug-in unit and a casing. The plug-in unit includes HMI, auxiliary power/BO module, BI/O module, AI/BI module, etc. The casing has various connectors for input and output.

Local HMI: including graphic display (supporting two character sizes with different row and column display capabilities), LED indicator lights (three protection indicator lights and 11 programmable matrix LEDs), keyboard (for navigation, control, and other operations), and communication ports.

Web HMI: accessible through a web browser, disabled by default, supports multiple functions such as programmable LED and event list viewing, system monitoring, parameter settings, etc. The menu structure is almost the same as the local HMI and can be accessed locally and remotely.

Authorization and Audit

Authorization: User categories have been predefined for LHMI and WHMI, including VIEWER, OPEROTOR, ENGINEER, and ADMINISTATOR, each with different permissions and default passwords. User authorization is disabled by default, but WHMI always uses authorization, and the default password can be changed by the administrator.

Audit Tracking: The 615 series IEDs provide a large number of event logging functions. Normal process related events can be viewed by ordinary users through the event viewer in PCM600. Critical system and IED security related events are recorded in separate non-volatile audit tracks for administrators to view. Audit tracking is a chronological record of system activities that can be checked and analyzed in a consistent manner using event lists and event viewers. IEDs store 2048 system events in non-volatile audit tracking, and 1024 process events are stored in non-volatile event lists, all following the FIFO principle.