Pilot Protection Based on Amplitude of Directional Travelling Wave for Voltage Source Converter-High Voltage Direct Current (VSC-HVDC) Transmission Lines

This paper presents a novel pilot protection scheme of DC cable line in voltage-source-converter (VSC) based multi-terminal DC (MTDC) grids, which utilizes a novel phase-mode transformation to decouple the bipolar DC cable current into six mode and it uses the stationary wavelet transform to extract the modulus maxima of fault initial traveling waves current (FITWC). With accurate amplitude and polarities of the FITWC being collected from the fault-detection devices located at each terminal, the proposed scheme can correctly determine the faulty segment and the faulty pole. In this paper, the ratio of amplitudes between sixth mode forward and backward travelling wave currents is used to judge the faulty segment and the polarity of fifth mode forward travelling wave current is used to identify the faulty pole. A four-terminal VSC-based MTDC grid was built in PSCAD/EMTDC to evaluate the performance of the fault-protection scheme. Simulation results for different cases demonstrate that the proposed protection scheme is robust against noise, and has been tested successfully for fault resistance of up to 400 Omega. Since the scheme merely needs the characteristics of FITWCs, the practical difficulties of detecting subsequent travelling waves are avoided. Moreover, only the state signal is needed to send to the other side in proposed scheme, so low communication speed can satisfy the requirement of relay protection and it does not need the data synchronization seriously.