A Multi-Inductor H Bridge Fault Current Limiter

Abstract

Current power systems will suffer from increasing pressure as a result of an upsurge in demand and will experience an ever-growing penetration of distributed power generation, which are factors that will contribute to a higher of incidence fault current levels. Fault current limiters (FCLs) are key power electronic devices. They are able to limit the prospective fault current without completely disconnecting in cases in which a fault occurs, for instance, in a power transmission grid. This paper proposes a new type of FCL capable of fault current limiting in two steps. In this way, the FCLs' power electronic switches experience significantly less stress and their overall performance will significantly increase. The proposed device is essentially a controllable H bridge type fault current limiter (HBFCL) that is comprised of two variable inductances, which operate to reduce current of main switch in the first stage of current limiting. In the next step, the main switch can limit the fault current while it becomes open. Simulation studies are carried out using MATLAB and its prototype setup is built and tested. The comparison of experimental and simulation results indicates that the proposed HBFCL is a promising solution to address protection issues.

Controllable reactor based hybrid HVDC breaker

“…In [18], a new LC type DC breaker is presented. In [19–22], a limiter reactor is used to improve operation of breaker. To upgrade technical operation of DC circuit breaker, novel topologies are presented in [23–25].…”

Parallel resonance type fault current limiting circuit breaker

“…Fault current limiters (FCLs) can act as a protective means to decrease the fault current in the electrical networks [3][4][5][6]. These devices can decrease the fault current successfully [7][8][9]. The conventional CBs have a considerable delay which causes voltage sag during the operation.…”

Multi-resistor BFCL for FRT capability improvement of DFIG-based wind farm

“…It can lead to the large transient rotor currents and DC link over voltage under grid faults, which may damage the DFIG [7 ]. The existing FRT schemes to protect the DFIG are mainly classified into software [8, 9, 10 ] and hardware [11–28 ] schemes. The software schemes are based on the rotor side converter (RSC) control modification.…”

“…Since the capacity of RSC is 25–30% of the DFIG power rated, it cannot produce enough rotor voltage to counteract the stator voltage drop during severe voltage sag and needs the hardware protection scheme to cope with this problem [11 ]. In literature, several hardware schemes have been proposed and documented to meet the FRT requirement of the DFIG, which can be classified as (i) parallel reactive power compensation controllers include static synchronous compensator and static var compensator [12 ], (ii) dynamic voltage restorer [13 ], (iii) unified inter‐phase power controller [14, 15 ], (iv) series dynamic resistor [16, 17 ], (v) energy storage system [18 ], (vi) fault current limiters (FCLs) [19–41 ]. FCLs have been recognised as an attractive protection device in power system, which not only limits the magnitude of fault current [19–25 ], but also improves the power quality [26–28 ], the transient recovery voltage of circuit breaker [29, 30 ], and the system stability [31 ].…”