DC Ring-Bus Microgrid Fault Protection and Identification of Fault Location

Abstract

A fault protection and location method for a dc bus microgrid system is presented in this paper. Unlike traditional ac systems, dc bus systems cannot survive or sustain high-magnitude fault currents. And if a fault causes the dc bus to de-energize completely, it makes locating faults very difficult. The main goal of the proposed scheme is to detect and isolate faults in the dc bus without de-energizing the entire system and identifying the fault location. In order to achieve this, a ring-type bus was used in this paper. The bus was segmented into overlapping nodes and links with circuit breakers (CBs) to isolate the segment in the event of a fault. Backup protection is implemented for circuit breaker failures to improve system reliability. A noniterative fault-location technique using a probe power is also presented in this paper. This probe power can also be used for a pilot test before main CB reclosing to avoid system issues that can be expected when the reclosing fails due to a permanent fault. The proposed algorithm can be implemented and executed by an intelligent electrical device for individual node. The proposed concepts have been verified with computer simulations and hardware experiments.