Challenges and lessons learned towards digital native medium voltage switchgears

Medium Voltage Switchgear is about to experience a significant change in its conception due to the new SF6-free requirements. This paper will focus on the three main topics that every switchgear needs to address to be defined as a Digital Native Product. Firstly, with the clear goal to improve Medium Voltage observability and provide accurate measurements to fault detectors, the challenges to embed voltage and current sensors in the switchgears will be addressed and analysed. Secondly, enclosure measurements such as real time temperature and switchgear pressure data will serve for health index estimations. Lastly, seamless IED integration in the switchgear needs to be studied to take clear advantage of the previous topics towards Digital Native switchgear. Each of these topics will be thoroughly studied in the paper, showing real results.