Smart Solid State Circuit Breaker for Photo Voltaic Power Plants

Abstract

This review present the state of the art of the circuit breaker for photovoltaic applications. The work consider the most used systems for this kind of applications, and in particular, starting from the state of the art of the mechanical Circuit Breaker, introduce the new emerging technologies based on Solid State Circuit Breaker and Hybrid Circuit Breaker. All the proposed systems will be compared each other in terms of robustness, galvanic insulation, intervention time, remote control etc. The study highlight that the Solid State Circuit Breaker are better in terms of protection capability and customization, thanks to the software based sensing method. This allow to design better protections for lines and equipment. For this reason, the authors think that in the future all circuit breaker technology will substitute the sensing hardware with digital based sensing. The last part of the paper introduce a laboratory prototype solid state circuit breaker, build to test different protection methods and understand limits of the digital sensing method. The experimental results confirm the higher performance in terms of accuracy, fast response and customization of the digital sensing if compared with classical hardware sensing.