ELVIS

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2

Market leading reliability for arc flash mitigation
Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Why is arc flash mitigation needed?

Without TVOC-2 With TVOC-2

29 October, 2019 Slide 2

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
What happens over time?

0.2 sec Steel fire

0.15 sec Copper fire

0.1 sec Cable fire

12 kV, 40 kA
Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Arc incident reasons

Touching live equipment

Human error 1
Making other mistakes in general

Mechanical
fault 2 Contact elements misaligned or worn

Bad Poor workmanship

connections
3
Wrong or poor quality hardware

Pollution 4 Dirty environment with lots of particles in the air

Animals 5 Small animals nesting in the switchgear

29 October, 2019 Slide 4

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Why isn’t the built in protection of the breaker enough?

Short circuit protection Selectivity

– During an arc flash event
• After an initial small increase of the current the arc itself will
act as a resistor limiting further current increase.
• The threshold of short circuit protection needs to be high
enough to take into account that power spikes might occur.
– This will result in that the breaker is very unlikely to detect the
arc through the short circuit protection
– For selectivity reasons a time delay is often put into the
breaker. Such a delay can be from 100ms and upwards before
the breaker even starts to open.
So even if the breaker might for some reason detect an
overcurrent, the breaker will open by the time the copper
components have started to burn.

The breaker will not be enough to protect against arc flash

29 October, 2019 Slide 5

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Arc resistant switchgear

The plus The minus

– During an arc flash event in closed cabinet – With the door open during work inside the switchgear the
• Directs the energy in less harmful direction energy will be directed outward.

• Contains the damage to only a portion of the switchgear
– Downtime will still be extensive since all the equipment inside
the afflicted cubicle will be destroyed.
– Since incident energy calculations have to be done taking worst
case scenario into account (door open) there will be no
lowering the energy thanks to arc resistance

Arc resistant switchgear will not replace the need for TVOC-2

29 October, 2019 Slide 6

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
How does it work?

Arc initiation Detection Activation Breaker opens

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Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
How does it work?

29 October, 2019 Slide 8

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Safety Intergity Level- SIL-2

TVOC-2 is the only optical arc flash mitigation device with SIL-2 in the market

Safety Integrity Level (known as SIL) as per IEC-61508 and IEC-62061

• A measure of safety system performance in terms of Probability of Failure on Demand (PFD), established to define a
metric for evaluating a system’s (or function’s) level of operational reliability with regards to maintaining safety

-03
• TVOC-2 is certified with a PFD of 3.49 x 10 (0.00349) per year for a period of 10 years after it is first connected (as
long as suggested maintenance is performed according to recommended intervals)

29 October, 2019 Slide 9

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Explaining light levels

60W at 2 cm

1 20–60 150–190 220–500 2000

Trip level

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Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Sensor fibers

Facts

• Prefabricated in different lengths (1–

60m).
• Preset from factory, no need for riskfull
calibration.
• Plastic fibre optical cable to ensure EMC
immunity
• Wide angle sensitive lens (to detect any
arc fault).

29 October, 2019 Slide 11

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Current sensing unit (CSU)

Specification

• Used to monitor current

• Simply connect CT’s with an output of 1, 2 or 5A
• Can monitor only 1 phase although 3 is suggested
• Must be adjusted to nominal current level
• Once current reaches 140% of set level, trip signal is sent
• 2 types of signals sent from CSU to TVOC-2
– Light = no fault, proper operation
– No light = overcurrent signal
• Total reaction time of TVOC-2 + CSU = 2-3ms when
monitoring current on 3 phases

29 October, 2019 Slide 12

Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Connections

Overview

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Arc guard system™ TVOC-2
Sensor placement

29 October, 2019 Slide 14