A DC Fault Protection Scheme for MMC-HVDC Grids Using New Directional Criterion

Abstract

To meet the ultra-fast, selective, and reliable requirements of the DC fault protection, a protection scheme for modular multilevel converter based HVDC grids is proposed in this paper. The protection scheme is consisted of main protection, directional pilot protection, and faulty pole identification. The new fault directional criterion is achieved by employing the surge arriving time difference of line-mode backward traveling wave and line-mode forward traveling wave. This criterion is valid even when the fault current limiting reactors (FCLRs) are installed at the converter side of DC bus. The main protection without communication and complex computation relies on co-operation of the derivative of line-mode forward traveling wave and the directional criterion. The directional pilot protection by comparing the double end directional criteria can be used as a backup protection. The accumulation of zero-mode component is adopted to discriminate the faulty pole. Simulations have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is capable of identifying various types of faults with different fault resistances at different positions. The robustness analysis shows that the protection scheme presented is not sensitive to the FCLR size, noise environment, sampling frequency, and the operation of hybrid DC circuit breakers.