Abstract
The protection of AC microgrids (MGs) is an issue of paramount importance to ensure their reliable and safe operation. Designing reliable protection mechanism, however, is not a trivial task, as many practical issues need to be considered. The operation mode of MGs, which can be grid-connected or islanded, employed control strategy and practical limitations of the power electronic converters that are utilized to interface renewable energy sources and the grid, are some of the practical constraints that make fault detection, classification, and coordination in MGs different from legacy grid protection. This article aims to present the state-of-the-art of the latest research and developments, including the challenges and issues in the field of AC MG protection. A broad overview of the available fault detection, fault classification, and fault location techniques for AC MG protection and coordination are presented. Moreover, the available methods are classified, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed.
Highlights
In the past decades, the high demand for energy and increased proliferation of renewable energy resources (RESs) like photovoltaic (PV), wind turbines, and fuel cells have gained significant attention worldwide
The US Department of Energy and IEEE std. 2030.7-2017 describes that microgrids are a group of distributed energy resources (DERs) and interconnected loads with a clearly defined electrical boundary that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid
By using the state recognition algorithm, the adaptive reconfigurations could be helpful for the decision making for the updating the protection scheme parameters and settings according to the MGs system changes to confirm the consistency of the proposed adaptive protection
Summary
The high demand for energy and increased proliferation of renewable energy resources (RESs) like photovoltaic (PV), wind turbines, and fuel cells have gained significant attention worldwide. During a fault in the MGs, its islanded mode of operation, fault detection, and protection scheme must be capable of isolating the minimum faulty section. Protection challenges including DC fault detection, location, and isolation in DC and MGs are reviewed in [47,48]. To the best of our knowledge, while these papers present protection issues and challenges, including the categorization of protection and coordination techniques, some concerns, such as fault detection, localization, and fault direction identification in AC MGs, have not been addressed or classified properly. This paper presents a detailed state-of-the-art on recent developments and challenges in AC MG protection considering fault detection and classification, fault localization, fault direction identification, and protection coordination.
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