An Accelerated Distance Protection Scheme for the Lines Connected to Inverter-Based Resources

Abstract

Distance relay based pilot protection schemes are commonly employed in industrial relays to provide fast tripping of the faulty transmission lines. However, the probable communication link failure or interruption can make these schemes ineffective. Therefore, some non-pilot methods are addressed in the technical literature which cannot offer an appropriate performance in the presence of inverter-based resources (IBRs) owing to the unconventional fault behavior of IBRs as compared with that of synchronous generators. Thus, an analytical non-pilot method is established for the accelerated tripping (AT) of the second zone of distance relay in the presence of IBRs. At the first place with the proposed method, the faulted phase is identified through a fault classification scheme. Within the second phase, using the strength of the variations existing in the negative and zero sequence components of both voltage and current signals, the remote breaker status is realized. Finally, according to the remote breaker status, the AT or delayed tripping decision is decided. Performance of the established methodology is examined for different simulation scenarios, such as different fault locations as well as fault resistances, employing the PSCAD/EMTDC software. The obtained promising results obviously approve the efficiency of the proposed framework.