An approach to disparage the blindness of backup protection in grid connected renewable energy sources system by inducing artificial fault current

Abstract

The renewable energy sources based distributed generation is increasingly penetrating into conventional distribution network . Aside from the technical and economical benefits, distributed generation may incapacitate the sensitivity of backup protection devices , which may face partial blindness in grid-connected, even full blindness in islanded mode of operation and during high impedance faults. This paper proposes a novel stratagem to completely plummet the blindness of backup relay by inducing the artificial fault current. A blindness severity index is developed to induce artificial fault current in a controlled manner according to blindness severity. Two methods are proposed. First, the OCR vulnerable to blindness is provided with an auxiliary current transformer, whose output is tuned in conjunction with blindness severity index and merged with main current transformer’s output to modulate its secondary current responsible for sensitivity. Second, the microprocessor based relay is used and the time current characteristics is modified by augmenting a new variable named as artificial fault current factor to scale the fault current. As, the current is increased by the TCC modification and no external equipment is added here, so named as AFC. To assure that the AFC is induced only in fault event and to prevent mal-functioning of OCR during normal operation, a simple logic is designed using AND gates to fend off trip signal to circuit breaker. The proposed protection scheme is evaluated on typical distribution feeder in Tianjin, China and IEEE-34 standard test benchmark and results show that the blindness of backup PDs is dwindled in a proficient manner.