An IEC 61850 GOOSE-Based Methodology for Arc Flash Incident Energy Reduction in Industrial Substations

Arc flash faults in industrial substations can release high levels of incident energy, particularly on the line side of incoming circuit breakers, where opening the local breaker alone does not eliminate the source contribution. This paper proposes and experimentally evaluates an IEC 61850-based methodology to mitigate this protection gap by transferring arc flash trip signals between substations using GOOSE messages. The methodology comprises laboratory validation of the complete GOOSE-based protection chain and communication network, followed by validation in an operating industrial substation. Laboratory tests demonstrated satisfactory performance for both homogeneous and multivendor IED configurations, although longer operating times were observed when the test current approached the overcurrent pickup setting. The communication network achieved a mean transfer time of 5.31 ms and a maximum of 6.00 ms. In the industrial case study, the maximum protection operating time was 90 ms. Considering a conservative total fault-clearing time of 107.5 ms, the incident energy was reduced from 7.34 cal/cm2 to 2.04 cal/cm2, corresponding to a reduction of approximately 72%. These results demonstrate the feasibility of IEC 61850 GOOSE communication for high-speed trip transfer, reducing fault-clearing time and mitigating incident energy under critical line-side fault conditions.