Proteção diferencial de transformadores de potência utilizando a transformada Wavelet

About 10% of faults involving the electrical system occurs in power transformers. Therefore, the protection applied to the power transformers is essential to ensure the continuous operation of this device and the efficiency of the electrical system. Among the protection functions applied to power transformers, the differential protection appears as one of the main schemes, presenting reliable discrimination between internal faults and external faults or inrush currents. However, when using the low frequency components of the differential currents flowing through the transformer, the main difficulty of the conventional methods of differential protection is the delay for detection of the events. However, internal faults, external faults and other disturbances related to the transformer operation present transient and can be appropriately detected by the wavelet transform. In this paper is proposed the development of a wavelet-based differential protection for detection and identification of external faults to the transformer, internal faults, and transformer energizing by using the wavelet coefficient energy of the differential currents. The obtained results reveal the advantages of using of the wavelet transform in the differential protection compared to conventional protection, since it provides reliability and speed in detection of these events.