White Paper - Residual Current Monitoring

The benefits of Residual Current Devices and Monitoring depend on the earthing protection system employed and the application.

Many good documents exist online put out by product manufacturers, research papers are not really going to be of much help in your selection process as they will likely be too narrow in focus rather than application specific.

Link

More information can also be found in your local electrical codes and standards relevant to data centres which will also specifically dictate whether or not Residual Current Devices and Monitoring is required or optional, which should greatly help in your selection process.

The choice of monitoring or not (where monitoring is not mandatory) is likely going to come down to cost, convenience and downtime risk mitigation.

Given the application, monitoring is probably not going to add too much extra cost as modern RCD devices can be purchased with the monitoring functionality built in that can pickup potential issues and alert maintenance to a potential insulation failure before it happens and knocks out power to part of the data centre.

British Standard 7671.

Are you a member of the IEEE? That would be one source for scholarly articles.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4592856

To ignore industry however is foolhardy. There can be a lot of good information provided by manufacturers of this equipment. In many cases, a lot more information is provided by manufacturers than you will ever find in academia. You just have to have your sales filters installed.

BTW, Insulation Monitoring Device = IMD.

This principle is embraced in modern industrial power systems to provide notice of an event (ground fault) on an ungrounded or high resistance grounded power system. While one ground fault will not shut the system down, a second ground on the other conductor certainly will. The probability of a 2nd fault is often improved with the existence of the first one, wire insulation breached to a grounded surface due to vibration or thermal cycling, one or two other conductors are typically in that same metal box. These IMDs are simple, and can be constructed to allow locating the fault with a galvanometer, without interrupting production. The defective component can be repaired at a scheduled interruption, rather than waiting until it devolves into a full blown short circuit.