A Novel Statistical and Adaptive Current and Voltage-Based Fault Protection Scheme Developed for Off-grid Low-Voltage DC Microgrids

Duong Minh Bui, Danh Hoang Le, Phuc Duy Le, Hieu Minh Nguyen

Abstract


This paper presents a novel fault protection scheme for standalone low-voltage (LV) DC microgrids (MG), which relies on the first-order current and voltage derivatives to detect pole-to-pole (P2P) and pole-to-ground (P2G) faults in the system. Local measurements of current and voltage signals are applied for the proposed protection scheme. To effectively adapt to high noise levels of current and voltage sensors from the local measurements, a Chi-square-based statistic method is developed to determine tripping thresholds of the current and voltage derivatives in this proposed protection scheme. To be highly adaptable to the directional change of fault currents in the DC microgrid, moreover, the standard deviation- and mean-based calculation of lower and upper boundaries of current and voltage parameters has been also applied for the protection system. As a new contribution of the paper, this novel statistical and adaptive current- and voltage-based protection system can be more effective in protecting source and load branches of the small-scaled LVDC microgrid. Specifically, irrespective of large transients and measurement noises during the standalone operation of DC MGs, different P2P and P2G faults can be detected and cleared within a few milliseconds. The protection design procedure for DC microgrids is also detailed in this paper. For high applicability, solid-state relays and microcontrollers are equipped for the off-grid 48VDC microgrid testbed to implement and validate the suggested novel fault protection algorithm by doing multiple staged-fault tests at different positions in this microgrid testbed.

Keywords


Chi-square threshold; current derivative; DC microgrid; voltage derivative; fault current; islanded operation

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DOI (PDF): https://doi.org/10.20508/ijrer.v16i2.15271.g9209

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