S&C has announced a major upgrade of Coordinaide — The S&C Protection and Coordination Assistant. This popular application tool — which was first introduced at the 2003 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition in Dallas — is available on the S&C website.

Coordinaide includes the full spectrum of electrical devices (e.g., transformers, capacitor units, conductors and cables, motors etc.) protected by S&C equipment. The online library of TCC curve data is quite extensive; more than 7500 individual curves are in the database. With Coordinaide, users can select the optional S&C fuse, TripSaver Dropout recloser, or Vista underground switchgear TCC curve that will:

• Protect transformers against damaging overcurrents and coordinate with primary- and secondary-side protective devices. See how S&C’s novel Transformer Protection Index can be used to determine if the primary fuse will protect against secondary-side faults, including arcing phase-to-ground secondary-side faults.
• Protect capacitor units against case rupture.
• Protect underground cables from insulation damage due to excessive temperatures.
• Protect overhead conductors from damage due to annealing.
• Coordinate with “R-Rated” motor-starter fuses to avoid unnecessary power outages.
• Selectively coordinate two or more devices in series to minimize service interruptions.

A number of features have been added or upgraded, including the following:

• Selective coordination of fuses with reclosers to minimize service interruptions. You can use either the “Conservative Method” or the more precise “Cooling Factor Method,” which takes into account the cooling of the fuse during the recloser’s reclosing-time interval (contacts open). Two applications are available:
  • Source-side fuse / load-side recloser (e.g., in a utility substation).
  • Source-side recloser / load-side fuse (e.g., a “fuse-saving” scheme).
• A greatly expanded data base of TCC curves, including:
  • IEC “C1-C5” and US “U1-U5” overcurrent relay cures for Vista Underground Distribution Switchgear and relayed circuit breakers.
  • Incident-arc-energy curves for personal protective equipment (PPE) Levels 1-4, for both the empirical and theoretical methods described in NFPA-70E, “Electrical Safety in the Workplace.”
  • TripSaver Dropout Recloser curves.
• The ability to display magnetizing-inrush currents as well as hot-load and cold-load pickup points. This feature can be invoked when a transformer is selected as the protected device. The industry “rule-of-thumb” points are default values (e.g., 12 times the full-load current of the transformer for 0.1 second), but user-selected values can also be entered.
• The ability to differentiate the precise preload and ambient-temperature adjustments applied to S&C fuses . . . vs. the brute-force 25% “safety zone” or “setback allowance” in terms of time generally applied to other fuses. (In the previous version of Coordinaide, S&C’s precise method of adjusting the minimum-melting curve of the fuse for preload and for high- or low-ambient temperatures was applied to all fuses.)
• The ability to eliminate the “cross-hatch” fill applied to the TCC curves. This is helpful when you’re trying to precisely determine the current or time values at which two or more TCC curves intersect. This feature can be found on the “Results” page.
• The ability to save applications. This much-requested feature can be found on the “Results” page too. By clicking on the “Export Application” button, application information and device data will be written to a text file. You can then use the copy (Ctrl “C”) and paste (Ctrl “V”) functions to save the information in Microsoft Excel. You can subsequently use these same functions to import the saved information back into Coordinaide.

Coordinaide’s opening page contains a brief description of the protection applications Coordinaide is designed to handle. If you launch the program you will be directed to a second page that contains a short “Conditions of Use” disclaimer. This is followed by a note detailing the minimum web browser requirements and a link to a “Helpful Hints” page. Once you have read and agreed to accept the Conditions of Use, one final click will launch the program.