Protection of High-Voltage DC Grids Using Traveling-Wave Frequency Characteristics

Fast dc fault detection in high-voltage dc (HVdc) grids is paramount due to the possibility of attaining a severely high fault current within few milliseconds. This article proposes a new traveling-wave (TW) based protection scheme to detect and locate faults in HVdc grids. In contrast to the existing TW-based protection and fault location approaches, the proposed scheme, first, utilizes only the first locally measured TW after the inception of a fault, and, second, focuses on the frequency content and polarity of the TW, rather than its arrival time. The direction of the TW is identified based on the pattern of the current TW waveform. A frequency spectral ratio of the current TW is proposed to identify the fault zone and fault location with high accuracy. The proposed method ensures a detection speed of 50 $\mu$s on overhead lines and 500 $\mu$s on underground cables. A remote backup scheme is coordinated with the primary protection and operates within 1.05 ms, which meets the speed requirement of HVdc grids. The performance of the proposed scheme has been, first, assessed using the CIGRE B4 HVdc test grid under various conditions, and, second, compared to existing single- and two-terminal TW methods.