Impact of SFCL on the Four Types of HVDC Circuit Breakers by Simulation

Abstract

Recently, studies on HVDC circuit breaker (CB) prototypes have shown successful test results. Nevertheless, effective and reliable solutions regarding massive fault energy during dc fault interruption have not yet been commercialized, and dc current breaking topologies on methods of achieving artificial zero should be somewhat modified. As an alternative, one feasible solution is to combine fault current limiting technologies with dc breaking topologies. In this paper, we studied the application of resistive superconducting fault current limiters (SFCLs) on various types of HVDC CB in order to estimate the effects of combining fault current limiters and conventional dc breakers. For the simulation works, four types of dc breaker topologies were modeled, including a mechanical CB using black-box arc model, a passive resonance CB (PRCB), an inverse current injection CB, and a hybrid HVDC CB. In addition, a resistive SFCL was simulated and added to the dc breakers to verify its interruption characteristic and distributed energy across HVDC CB. From the simulation results, we found that the maximum fault current, interruption time, and dissipated energy stress on the HVDC CB could be decreased by applying SFCL. In addition, it was observed that, among four types of HVDC CB, PRCB with SFCL exhibited the best observable enhancement.