Design of a reliable and coordinated protection strategy for zonal shipboard power systems

Abstract

The reliable performance of the shipboard power system (SPS) is essential for the safe and efficient operation of marine vessels. SPSs are subject to various types of electrical faults that can cause equipment failure, system downtime, and even catastrophic events. One effective way to provide redundancy and fault tolerance in the event of a fault or failure is through the use of zonal configuration. However, the protection of such systems is a challenging task due to their complex topology and the potential for multiple sources of fault. Therefore, it is imperative to protect the SPS with zonal configuration from various types of fault to ensure its continuous operation. This article presents a comprehensive coordinated protection strategy for a hybrid AC/DC SPS with the zonal configuration by using the available protective equipment. The proposed strategy consists of fault current limiting, grounding, fault detection, and faulty section isolation, and provides both primary and backup protections for all SPS equipment, including generator, busbar, line, input and output feeders, loads, propulsion motors, and DC system. Also, it does not require a comprehensive communication infrastructure and training dataset. The selective and reliable performance of the proposed protection strategy is verified through several case studies under various fault scenarios in the ETAP environment. The article provides valuable insights into the selection and implementation of appropriate protection measures for the SPS with ring configuration which are useful for the designers, operators, and maintenance personnel, improving the reliability and safety of these critical and autonomous systems.

A Novel Fault Detection and Location Approach for DC Zonal Shipboard Microgrid Based on High-Frequency Impedance Estimation With IEC 61850 Communication Protocol

“…The protection schemes of the short-circuit faults for the DC zonal distribution in SPSs have many challenges, such as the coordination of the protection devices and the power electronics to provide a robust protection system, the fault current changes when operating in the islanded mode, difficulty in designing a grounding system, severe transient discharge, and lack of current zero-crossing point which leads to an arc flash in the circuit breaker. The challenges also include the increase in the physical burden of the protection system (such as DC breakers), dynamic characteristics of renewable resources, bidirectional power flow, and the presence of pulsed loads with its smaller scale that are resulting in short circuit impedan ce differences in various locations [3], [8]- [12]. The existence of pulsed loads presents a challenge in distinguishing between normal and fault currents, as these loads have a large peak power and high-power change rate.…”

Diagnostic Method for Short Circuit Faults at the Generator End of Ship Power Systems Based on MWDN and Deep-Gated RNN-FCN

“…Firstly, they heavily rely on domain-specific expert experience and prior knowledge, resulting in limited generalization and suboptimal performance when detecting faults in different objects. Secondly, the harsh operating conditions of ship power systems generate significant amounts of noise, preventing traditional algorithms from extracting reliable features for detecting faults in generators [16]. Thirdly, ship power grid data exhibit the "4V" characteristics, leading to imbalanced datasets due to the generation of massive amounts of data during operation, coupled with limited fault data.…”