High speed protection of medium voltage DC distribution system using modified mathematical morphology

Abstract One of the challenging issues in the realization of medium‐voltage DC (MVDC) distribution system is high‐speed protection scheme design against quickly rising short circuit fault‐DC current. This paper proposes a high‐speed protection scheme based on the processing of energy signals through mathematical morphology (MM). The voltage and current signals measured at a distribution line section (DLS) are used to obtain the energy signal. The proposed scheme develops a modified MM‐based filter to extract the transient information in the energy signal rapidly and distinctly in the form of positive/negative polarity. The polarity detection of any disturbance in the analysed energy signal indicates the occurrence of a sudden disturbance in the system. The sudden disturbance occurrence confirmation triggers the faulty DLS identification and classification algorithms of the proposed scheme. The faulty DLS identification and classification algorithms are based on the detected polarities of the energy signal. The protection scheme requires low bandwidth communication. The proposed protection scheme is evaluated by using a ±2.5 kV radial distribution network containing 4 feeders under different fault conditions in MATLAB/SIMULINK software. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme can isolate the faulty portion within a few milliseconds after fault inception under a variety of fault cases.