Local fault location in meshed DC microgrids based on parameter estimation technique

Accurate locating of the faulty section is desired in DC microgrid due to the presence of power electronic converters and low-impedance cables. Some of the existing schemes consider power sources at only one end of the line; thus, assume that the fault current is injected from only one end of the line. This assumption is not true in the case of meshed DC microgrids, where fault current would be supplied from both ends. Moreover, existing communication-based methods require either a fast communication network or data synchronization. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a novel local fault location scheme for meshed DC microgrids. Low- and high-impedance faults are located by measuring the current by localized intelligent electronic device (LIED). Based on the parameter estimation approach, the fault location is estimated by sampling the peak values of the fault current. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is evaluated based on offline digital time-domain simulations in MATLAB/Simulink software environment for a meshed test microgrid system and experimentally verified by implementing in a laboratory-scale hardware setup. Comparing the proposed method with other existing methods proves the effectiveness of the proposed technique for different types of faults.