Reliable Remote Relay Protection in Smart Grid

As the false trips of remote protection relays are among the main reasons behind cascading blackouts, it is critical to design reliable relay protection. Even though common protection schemes on traditional power systems have been investigated for a few decades, cascading failures in recent years indicate more research needed in this area. Consequently, researchers have proposed agent-based methods on the Smart Grid （SG） to address this issue. However, these existing agent-based methods simply use TCP protocol without considering real-time communication requirements （such as bandwidth and delay）. To deal with this issue, several methods for efficient network resource management are proposed. Furthermore, these existing methods do not consider the potential issues in practical communication networks, which may result in delay violation and trigger relay false trips. We have discussed simple backup solutions in the previous work. In this paper, in addition to network efficiency, we focus on improving the system reliability by exploring known power system information and minimizing the chances of false trips of important remote relays, e.g., defining power line priorities based on their importance. Moreover, to further improve the. system reliability, we also in- vestigate the peer-to-peer protection approaches to address the single point of failure of centralized control center.

Development of data acquisition and over-current protection systems for a suppressor-grid current with a neutral-beam ion source

Neutral beam injection is one of the effective auxiliary heating methods in magnetic-confinementfusion experiments. In order to acquire the suppressor-grid current signal and avoid the grid being damaged by overheating, a data acquisition and over-current protection system based on the PXI（PCI e Xtensions for Instrumentation） platform has been developed. The system consists of a current sensor, data acquisition module and over-current protection module. In the data acquisition module,the acquired data of one shot will be transferred in isolation and saved in a data-storage server in a txt file. It can also be recalled using NBWave for future analysis. The over-current protection module contains two modes： remote and local. This gives it the function of setting a threshold voltage remotely and locally, and the forbidden time of over-current protection also can be set by a host PC in remote mode. Experimental results demonstrate that the data acquisition and overcurrent protection system has the advantages of setting forbidden time and isolation transmission.

Protection and control of microgrids using dynamic state estimation

High penetration of Converter Interfaced Generations(CIGs)presents challenges in both microgrid(μGrid)circuit and other system with CIG resources,such as wind farms and PV plants.Specifically,protection challenges are mainly brought by the insufficient separation between fault and load currents,especially forμGrids in islanded operation,and the short connection length inμGrids.In addition,CIG resources exhibit limited inertia and weak coupling to any rotating machinery,which can result in large transients during disturbances.To address the above challenges,this paper proposes a Dynamic State Estimation(DSE)based algorithm for protection and control of systems with substantial CIG resources such as aμGrid.It requires a high-fidelity dynamic model and time domain(sampled value)measurements.ForμGrid circuit protection,the algorithm dependably and securely detects internal faults by checking the consistency between the circuit model and available measurements.For CIG control,the algorithm estimates the frequency at other parts of aμGrid using CIG local information only and then utilizes it to provide supplementary feedback control.Simulation results prove that DSE based protection algorithm detects internal faults faster,ignores external faults and has improved sensitivity towards high impedance faults when compared to conventional protection methods.DSE based CIG control scheme also minimizes output oscillation and transient during system disturbances.

Guest editorial: special issue on wide area monitoring, protection and control in smart grid

Complexity of modern electrical power systems is steadily increasing.This is inspiring researchers and developers to propose new solutions capable to address a number of challenges,particularly those related to power system operation.A massive penetration of asynchronously connected renewable energy generation,the generation connected over inverters,is significantly changing the dynamics of modern power systems.From one hand,the power system response time is becoming shorter and at the same time the fault level is becoming smaller.This is significantly affecting requirements of control loops,as well as power system protection.

Frequency domain based DC fault analysis for bipolar HVDC grids

This paper proposes a frequency domain based methodology to analyse the influence of High Voltage Direct Current(HVDC) configurations and system parameters on the travelling wave behaviour during a DC fault. The method allows us to gain deeper understanding of these influencing parameters. In the literature, the majority of DC protection algorithms essentially use thefirst travelling waves initiated by a DC fault for fault discrimination due to the stringent time constraint in DC grid protection. However, most protection algorithms up to now have been designed based on extensive time domain simulations using one specific test system. Therefore, general applicability or adaptability to different configurations and system changes is not by default ensured, and it is difficult to gain in-depth understanding of the influencing parameters through time domain simulations. In order to analyse the first travelling wave for meshed HVDC grids, voltage and current wave transfer functions with respect to the incident voltage wave are derived adopting Laplace domain based component models. The step responses obtained from the voltage transfer functions are validated by comparison against simulations using a detailed model implemented in PSCADTM. Then, the influences of system parameters such as the number of parallel branches, HVDC grid configurations and groundings on the first travelling wave are investigated by analysing the voltage and current transfer functions.

Application of new directional logic to improve DC side fault discrimination for high resistance faults in HVDC grids

This paper proposes a simple and fast way to determine the direction of a fault in a multi-terminal high voltage direct current(HVDC) grid by comparing the rate of change of voltage(ROCOV) values at either side of the di/dt limiting inductors at the line terminals. A local measurement based secure and fast protection method is implemented by supervising a basic ROCOV relay with a directional element. This directional information is also used to develop a slower communication based DC line protection scheme for detecting high resistance faults. The proposed protection scheme is applied to a multi-level modular converter based three-terminal HVDC grid and its security and sensitivity are evaluated through electromagnetic transient simulations. A methodology to set the protection thresholds considering the constraints imposed by the breaker technology and communication delays is also presented. With properly designed di/dt limiting inductors,the ability of clearing any DC transmission system fault before fault currents exceeds a given breaker capacity is demonstrated.

Study on Clamping Type DC Circuit Breaker with Short Fault Isolation Time and Low Energy Dissipation

The development of DC grids faces challenges from DC fault protection.The conventional DC circuit breaker(DCCB)employs metal-oxide varistor(MOV)to isolate the faulted line,in which the fault isolation process is coupled with the energy dissipation process.In this study,a clamping type DCCB(CTCB)using internal capacitors to clamp the converter voltage is proposed.Thanks to the proposed configuration,fault isolation and energy dissipation are decoupled,resulting in a fast fault isolation and low energy dissipation compared to the conventional DCCB.The working principle of the proposed CTCB is presented and verified in a DC grid simulation model.A comparison is made with the traditional DCCB.The fault isolation time can be reduced by 34.5%.The dissipated energy can be reduced by 17.4%.The energy dissipation power can be reduced by 76.2%.

Low Impedance Fault Identification and Classification Based on Boltzmann Machine Learning for HVDC Transmission Systems

Identification and classification of DC faults are considered as fundamentals of DC grid protection.A sudden rise of DC fault current must be identified and classified to immediately operate the corresponding interrupting mechanism.In this paper,the Boltzmann machine learning(BML)approach is proposed for identification and classification of DC faults using travelling waves generated at fault point in voltage source converter based high-voltage direct current(VSC-HVDC)transmission system.An unsupervised way of feature extraction is performed on the frequency spectrum of the travelling waves.Binomial class logistic regression(BCLR)classifies the HVDC transmission system into faulty and healthy states.The proposed technique reduces the time for fault identification and classification because of reduced tagged data with few characteristics.Therefore,the faults near or at converter stations are readily identified and classified.The performance of the proposed technique is assessed via simulations developed in MATLAB/Simulink and tested for pre-fault and post-fault data both at VSC1 and VSC2,respectively.Moreover,the proposed technique is supported by analyzing the root mean square error to show practicality and realization with reduced computations.