A pilot protection scheme for flexible HVDC transmission lines based on modulus power

Abstract

Existing protection methods for Flexible HVDC transmission lines easily fail to detect the fault location fast and reliably. Concerning this problem, a modulus power based pilot protection scheme is proposed. By analyzing the dynamic switching process of sub-modules in flexible DC converter station, the expression of converter station DC voltage taking into account the influence of AC system is derived. On this basis, the modulus voltage and modulus current are calculated by phase-modulus transformation, and the modulus power calculation model containing DC components alone is built. Then, the expressions of modulus power in different fault cases are derived, and a protection criterion based on the polarity difference characteristics of modulus power is established. Finally, the RT-LAB is used to build the model of a flexible DC system for simulation verification. The results of simulation tests verify that, the proposed protection scheme can detect the fault line and fault pole fast and accurately, with easy threshold setting and low demand on communication synchronization. Besides, it is unaffected by the fault resistance and the specific boundary conditions of current-limiting reactor, etc.