Failure rate estimation of MOV for condition monitoring of surge protective devices

MOV(Metal Oxide Varistor) is the most important part of SPD(Surge Protective Device) which can protect electric facilities from an impulse current such as a lightning. So far, the fault of MOVs have decided only by surge count without considering magnitude of surge current and an amount of input energy. This paper proposed the fault prediction algorithm for the MOV using look up table made by surge count and input current data which have non-linear characteristics for input current and are estimated by high voltage experimental results. Proposed algorithm was proved by experiment on verification at a high voltage laboratory.