IEC 61850 Communication-Based Pilot Distance Protective IED for Fault Detection and Location in DC Zonal Shipboard Microgrid

An intelligent electronic device (IED) is presented in this article to provide rapid fault detection and location method for ship power systems (SPSs). The IED employs the pilot distance protection scheme with IEC 61850 communication network. The proposed distance scheme depends on the high-frequency fault transient feature in which the high-frequency components of current and voltage are extracted and analyzed to estimate the system's impedance and the fault's location by comparing the estimated impedance with the prescribed threshold. After that, the proposed IEDs can communicate with each other based on IEC 61850 to protect the whole line instantaneously. A 660 V DC zonal SPS is simulated using MATLAB/Simulink environment. The proposed IED is further validated experimentally using a small-scale prototype. The proposed method can quickly and accurately identify faulted areas and locate faults of different types at various locations. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in case of noise influence, communication failure and in case of analyzing fault severity (in the case of different fault resistance at different locations). The simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in locating the faults that occur in DC zonal SMGs. The fault can be cleared in 2 ms.