Integrated Microgrid Islanding Detection with Phase Angle Difference for Reduced Nondetection Zone

Abstract

Microgrids with distributed generation (DG) are rapidly coming into distribution networks to supply load demand in order to preserve ecological balance and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Power electronic advancements are making renewables dispatchable to loads while turning passive networks to active with bidirectional power flow. The IEEE-1547-2018 regulations enforced certain standards on microgrids, including the ability to detect unintended failures, island the microgrid in less than 2 seconds, and feed connected loads while maintaining voltage, frequency, and power quality. There are numerous islanding techniques accessible, including passive, active, hybrid, and communication techniques. The active techniques degrade power quality due to injection of deviations, passive type leaves larger nondetection zone (NDZ), and communication type are costly. The hybrid type combines both passive and active methods. To get away from all these issues, a passive technique is formulated in this paper, which measures the differential phase angle of voltage and current at DG output, to detect islanding. This approach reliably identifies islanding in 20 ms at nearly zero NDZ. This approach is also stable during transient conditions such as load switching and throwing off. There is also no power quality issue because there are no injections during testing. This method is tested in MATLAB/Simulink and evaluated using the differential frequency technique to get performance indices in accordance with UL-1741 testing standards.