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WIREs Energy Environ.

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Review of DC fault protection for HVDC grids

Advanced Review

Rui Li, Lie Xu

Published Online: Dec 08 2017

DOI: 10.1002/wene.278

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The development of modular multilevel converter (MMC) and the increased needs for long distance bulk power transmission using underground and subsea cables have promoted the rapid development and application of voltage source converter (VSC) based high‐voltage DC (HVDC) systems. In this paper, recent advances in the area of DC fault protection in VSC‐based HVDC systems are reviewed. The main characteristics during DC faults are described and various converter topologies, which have DC fault blocking capability, are introduced and compared in terms of efficiency, cost, and control flexibility. The development of DC circuit breaker is introduced and various methods for DC fault detection and system level protection approaches for large scale HVDC grids are also discussed. WIREs Energy Environ 2018, 7:e278. doi: 10.1002/wene.278 This article is categorized under: Energy Infrastructure > Systems and Infrastructure Energy Systems Economics > Systems and Infrastructure

DCCB circuit: (a) mechanical DCCB (Li, Xu, Holliday, et al., ), (b) solid‐state DCCB (Kontos, Pinto, Rodrigues, & Bauer, ), (c) hybrid DCCB with director switches (Callavik, Blomberg, Häfner, & Jacobson, ; Derakhshanfar, Jonsson, Steiger, & Habert, ; Dijkhuizen & Berggren, ), and (d) hybrid DCCB with FB SMs (Zhou et al., )

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Handshaking DC fault detection in a three‐terminal meshed DC grid with a fault applied at Cable 1 (Lianxiang & Boon‐Teck, )

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Alternative topology with DC fault blocking capability: (a) alternate arm converter (AAC) (Farr et al., ; Judge et al., ; Merlin et al., ; Merlin et al., ), (b) hybrid cascaded converter with two‐level VSC in the main circuit (Adam, Abdelsalam, Ahmed, & Williams, ; Adam, Ahmed, et al., ; Yinglin, Zheng, & Qingrui, ; Yushu, Adam, Lim, Finney, & Williams, ), (c) hybrid cascaded converter with MMC in the main circuit (Li, Adam, Holliday, Fletcher, & Williams, )

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DC fault current path of unipolar submodule circuits: (a) unipolar FB SM, (b) unipolar CC SM, and (c) unipolar mixed SM (Li, Fletcher, et al., ; Rong, Lie, & Liangzhong, )

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Fault current behavior at different stages: (a) Stage I, (b) Stage II, (c) Stage III

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Fault current path after the SMs are blocked: (a) FB (Chao, Adam, Finney, & Williams, ; Kenzelmann et al., ), (b) CD (Marquardt, ; Marquardt, ), (c) CC (Nami, Wang, Dijkhuizen, & Shukla, ), and (d) mixed SMs (Adam, Ahmed, & Williams, )

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Circuit of a HB‐MMC

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Partitioned DC fault protection in large DC networks using fast acting DCCBs or DC‐DC converter at strategic locations ()

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Active control of DC fault currents for MMCs (Li, Xu, Holliday, et al., )

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