The Performance and Robustness of Power Protection Schemes for Grid-Connected PV Systems Under Varied Smart Inverter Controllers

The increasing use of inverter-based distributed generation requires a comprehensive study of its effects on fault analysis and the effectiveness of protection systems in distribution networks. This study examines the impact of different inverter control modes on multiple types of protective relay schemes. These include different overcurrent relay (OCR) schemes, both standard and nonstandard tripping characteristics, optimal coordination approaches, and different grid operation scenarios. The investigation is conducted through the utilization of grid-connected and islanding operation modes, with fault resistance values of 0 and 5 Omega. The study is carried out on a 14-bus CIGRE network which includes two photovoltaic (PV) farms with a capacity of 10 MVA each. The research provides several significant contributions, including the analysis of fault current contributions, examination of issues in OCR protection, investigation of the influence of fault impedance levels on OCR performance, evaluation of ideal coordination methods, and carrying out a comparative analysis utilizing optimization technique by using the water cycle optimization algorithm (WCA) and the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO). In addition, to guarantee the robustness of the suggested protection strategy, this work adopts a hardware-in-the-loop approach. The OMICRON-256 system is utilized to carry out real-time testing on a SIPROTEC 7SJ62 multifunction protection relay, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method in protecting microgrids under different PV control strategies. The total operating time for the nonstandard tripping scheme was 12.077-12.3003 s for PSO and WCA, respectively, while for the standard tripping scheme, it was 12.1226 and 12.1564 s. Moreover, these findings offer practical insights that can assist operators in effectively designing the power networks with grid-connected PV systems by showing OCR miscoordination and no tripping events in power systems with PVs under inverters controllers.