What is Knee Point Voltage of Current Transformer?

This is the significance of saturation level of a CT core mainly used for protection purposes. The sinusoidal voltage of rated frequency applied to the secondary terminals of current transformer, with other winding being open circuited, which when increased by 10% cause the exiting current to increase 50%. The CT core is made of CRGO steel.

It has its won saturation level.

The EMF induced in the CT secondary windings is

E2 = 4.44φfT2

Where, f is the system frequency, φ is the maximum magnetic flux in Wb. T2 is the number of turns of the secondary winding. 

The flux in the core, is produced by excitation current Ie. We have a non-liner relationship between excitation current and magnetizing flux. After certain value of excitation current, flux will not further increase so rapidly with increase in excitation current. This non-liner relation curve is also called B – H curve. 

Again from the equation above, it is found that, secondary voltage of a current transformer is directly proportional to flux φ. Hence one typical curve can be drawn from this relation between secondary voltage and excitation current as shown below.

It is clear from the curve that, linear relation between V and Ie is maintained from point A and K. The point ′A′ is known as ′ankle point′ and point ′K′ is known as ′Knee Point′.

In differential and restricted earth fault (REF) protection scheme, accuracy class and ALF of the CT may not ensure the reliability of the operation. It is desired that, differential and REF relays should not be operated when fault occurs outside the protected transformer. When any fault occurs outside the differential protection zone, the faulty current flows through the CTs of both sides of electrical power transformer. The both LV and HV CTs have magnetizing characteristics. Beyond the knee point, for slight increase in secondary emf a large increasing in excitation current is required. So after this knee point excitation current of both current transformers will be extremely high, which may cause mismatch between secondary current of LV & HV current transformers. This phenomena may cause unexpected tripping of power transformer. So the magnetizing characteristics of both LV & HV sides CTs, should be same that means they have same knee point voltage Vk as well as same excitation current Ie at Vk/2. 

It can be again said that, if both knee point voltage of current transformer and magnetizing characteristic of CTs of both sides of power transformer differ, there must be a mismatch in high excitation currents of the CTs during fault which ultimately causes the unbalancing between secondary current of both groups of CTs and transformer trips.

So for choosing CT for differential protection of transformer, one should consider current transformer PS class rather its convectional protection class. PS stands for protection special which is defined by knee point voltage of current transformer Vk and excitation current Ie at Vk/2.