Controlled Bidirectional DC Circuit Breaker With Zero Negative Current for High Load Shift Applications

Abstract

Global electricity generation by renewable energy sources and the electrification of the transportation system are gaining more importance to mitigate climate change. The dc system plays a significant role in these developments. To protect dc systems, dc circuit breakers with advanced technology are required that are fast and reliable. Various solid-state dc circuit breakers, such as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Z$</tex-math></inline-formula> -source and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$</tex-math></inline-formula> -source circuit breakers, have been presented in the literature to meet the dc system demand; however, these topologies suffer from limitations such as high conduction loss, complexity in design, no physical isolation, and presence of negative current flow in load during reclosing. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, a bidirectional solid-state dc circuit breaker (BD-SSCB) that detects the overload or short-circuit faults and responds instantaneously to mitigate the fault current has been proposed in this article. The controllable shutoff function is much needed in applications where sudden load change occurs continuously during the normal operation, such as varying acceleration of an electric vehicle. The proposed BD-SSCB is validated using spice simulations and hardware experiments with varying system parameters for a system rating of 400 V/10 A.