Publications

Fault Current Control for DC Microgrid Protection Using an Adaptive Droop

Augustine, Sijo; Brahma, Sukumar M.; Reno, Matthew J.

Successful system protection is critical to the performance of the DC microgrid system. This paper proposes an adaptive droop based fault current control for a standalone low voltage (LV) solar-photovoltaic (PV) based DC microgrid protection. In the proposed method, a DC microgrid fault is detected by the current and voltage thresholds. Generally, the droop method is used to control the power sharing between the converters by controlling the reference voltage. In this paper, this scheme is extended to control the fault current by calculating an adaptive virtual resistance Rdroop, and to control the converter output reference voltage. This effectively controls the converter pulse width, and reduces the flow of source current from a particular converter which helps to increase the fault clearing time. Additionally, a trip signal is sent to the corresponding DC circuit breaker (DCCB), to isolate the faulted converter, feeder or a DC bus. The design procedure is detailed, and the effectiveness of proposed method is verified by simulation analysis.