ABSTRACT
Power-sharing between countries has an essential effect on increasing the power system's reliability and allowing a resilient energy market. High voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems are preferable for long-distance transmission to decrease power losses. However, HVDC transmission lines have many protection challenges including the differentiability between various types of HVDC circuit breakers (HVDC-CB). Although mechanical HVDC-CBs suffered from long response time, they superseded their solid-state counterparts in terms of price and power losses. In this paper, a multi-injection commutation system MICS-HVDC-CB is developed to provide economic and fast response HVDC-CB. The proposed breaker doesn't add external elements to avoid any price increase but instead modifies the existing topology. The MICS consists of multiple L-C commutation circuits inserted sequentially following the receiving of the tripping signal. The proposed MICS-HVDC-CB was tested upon a real transmission line using ATP simulation software. The results emphasize that the developed MICS-HVDC-CB decreased the arcing time to 38.5% and 20% compared to passive and active DC-CBs. The impact of cooling power, arcing time constant, and fault resistance was also investigated. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed MICS topology in reducing the arcing time while keeping a simple and economic breaker structure.
ABSTRACT
Various overvoltage mitigation schemes were used in literature in suppression of switching overvoltages in wind farms. However, the evaluation of how the effectiveness of these mitigation techniques would vary with the change of the wind farm topology is still un-explored territory. The main aim of this paper is to study the effectiveness of four mitigation schemes while using SF6 circuit breaker namely; R-L smart choke, R-C snubber circuit, surge capacitor and pre-insertion resistor (PIR) were studied in four different wind farm topologies; radial, single-sided ring, double-sided ring and star topologies. The topologies were based on a real wind farm located in Zaafrana, Egypt. The results showed that R-L choke to be the most effective scheme for all topologies followed by PIR, R-C snubber and surge capacitor schemes respectively. Their percentage of reduction of overvoltage ranged from 62 to 84% for R-L choke, 33-67% for PIR, 8-25% for R-C snubber circuits and 4-15% for surge capacitors. Also, it was shown that the change of the wind farm topology didn't affect the order of effectiveness of the mitigation schemes such that R-L remained the most effective and surge capacitor the least effective for all topologies.
