Utilization of Supercapacitors in Adaptive Protection Applications for Resiliency against Communication Failures: A Size and Cost Optimization Case Study
- Florida Intl Univ., Miami, FL (United States)
Microgrids’ adaptive protection techniques rely on communication signals from the point of common coupling to ad- just the corresponding relays’ settings for either grid-connected or islanded modes of operation. However, during communication out- ages or in the event of a cyberattack, relays settings are not changed. Thus adaptive protection schemes are rendered unsuc- cessful. Due to their fast response, supercapacitors, which are pre- sent in the microgrid to feed pulse loads, could also be utilized to enhance the resiliency of adaptive protection schemes to communi- cation outages. Proper sizing of the supercapacitors is therefore im- portant in order to maintain a stable system operation and also reg- ulate the protection scheme’s cost. This paper presents a two-level optimization scheme for minimizing the supercapacitor size along with optimizing its controllers’ parameters. The latter will lead to a reduction of the supercapacitor fault current contribution and an increase in that of other AC resources in the microgrid in the ex- treme case of having a fault occurring simultaneously with a pulse load. It was also shown that the size of the supercapacitor can be reduced if the pulse load is temporary disconnected during the transient fault period. Simulations showed that the resulting super- capacitor size and the optimized controller parameters from the proposed two-level optimization scheme were feeding enough fault currents for different types of faults and minimizing the cost of the protection scheme.
- Research Organization:
- Florida International Univ. (FIU), Miami, FL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Electricity (OE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- OE0000779
- OSTI ID:
- 1372913
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: IEEE Industry Applications Society Annual Meeting.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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