A clamping type DC circuit breaker with short fault isolation time and low energy dissipation

Abstract

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) uses 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 %. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>