Open Access

ARTICLE

A Fault Current Limiting Hybrid DC Circuit Breaker

Lei Huang^*, Qian Zhang, Wenlei Liu, Ruixue Liu

Mechanical and Control Engineering College, Shengli College China University of Petroleum, Dongying, 257061, China

* Corresponding Author: Lei Huang. Email:

(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Advances in Modern Electric Power and Energy Systems)

Energy Engineering 2022, 119(2), 621-636. https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2022.016769

Received 25 March 2021; Accepted 01 July 2021; Issue published 24 January 2022

Abstract

Due to the low impedance characteristic of the high voltage direct current (HVDC) grid, the fault current rises extremely fast after a DC-side fault occurs, and this phenomenon seriously endangers the safety of the HVDC grid. In order to suppress the rising speed of the fault current and reduce the current interruption requirements of the main breaker (MB), a fault current limiting hybrid DC circuit breaker (FCL-HCB) has been proposed in this paper, and it has the capability of bidirectional fault current limiting and fault current interruption. After the occurrence of the overcurrent in the HVDC grid, the current limiting circuit (CLC) of FCL-HCB is put into operation immediately, and whether the protected line is cut off or resumed to normal operation is decided according to the fault detection result. Compared with the traditional hybrid DC circuit breaker (HCB), the required number of semiconductor switches and the peak value of fault current after fault occurs are greatly reduced by adopting the proposed device. Extensive simulations also verify the effectiveness of the proposed FCL-HCB.

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Keywords

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