A Novel Method to Discriminate the Internal Fault from the External Fault in High Voltage Direct Current Network Using Current Symmetrical Components

Subject Areas : Power Engineering

Fateme Fallahi Meybodi ¹ , Ahmad Mirzaei ²

1 - Department of Electrical Engineering, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran
2 - Department of Electrical Engineering, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

Received: 2024-12-19 Accepted : 2025-02-19 Published : 2026-09-22

Keywords: Backup protection, Direct current high voltage network, Current source converter, Symmetrical components.,

Abstract :

Considering the huge amount of transmitted power in high voltage direct current networks, protection of these networks against internal and external faults of the network is of particular importance. For the correct operation of protection equipment and prevention of DC pole block in AC faults, first the internal fault must be distinguished from the external fault of the network and then, according to the position of the fault, the appropriate protective function should be applied. Also, to increase reliability, backup protection is essential when the primary protection fails. In this paper, the current symmetrical components inside the converters are analyzed under various fault conditions in a high voltage direct current network and according to that, a new protection method is proposed, which can discriminate the internal fault from the external fault in the network by checking the negative component of the fault current on the rectifier or inverter side and comparing of the average value of the negative and zero components of the fault current. This single-ended method with low sampling rate doesn’t need a communication line and along with differential protection can increase the reliability and speed of the backup protection system. The data of this paper are obtained by simulating a bipolar high voltage direct current transmission system with 12-pulse current source converter in PSCAD software based on the frequency-dependent line model. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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