Time-domain Protection of Superconducting Cables based on Artificial Intelligence Classifiers

Fault detection and protection of Superconducting Cables (SCs) is considered a challenging task due to the effects of the quenching phenomenon of High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) tapes and the prospective magnitude of fault currents in presence of highly-resistive faults and converter-interfaced generation. This paper presents a novel, time-domain method for discriminative detection of faults in a power system incorporating SCs and high penetration of renewable energy sources. The proposed algorithms utilises feature extraction tools based on Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT), as well as artificial intelligence (AI) classifiers to discriminate between external and internal faults, and other network events. The performance of the proposed schemes has been validated in electromagnetic transient simulation environment using a verified model of SC. Simulation results revealed that the proposed algorithms can effectively and within short period of time discriminate internal faults occurring on SC, while remain stable to external faults and other disturbances. The suitability of the proposed algorithms for real-time implementation has been verified using software and hardware in the loop testing environment. To determine the best options for real-time deployment, two different artificial intelligence classifiers namely Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) have been deployed. The extensive assessment of their performance revealed that the ANN classifier is advantageous in term of prediction speed.