Comparison between inductive and resistive SFCL in terms of current limitation and power system transient stability

In this paper, authors present a comparative study of inductive and resistive superconducting fault current limiters (SFCL) from current limitation and power system transient stability point of view. Different types of SFCL can be used to decrease the amplitude of fault current in a power system. The two most used are resistive type (rSFCL) and inductive type (iSFCL). However, no studies have been done to show the difference between them in term of current limitation and transient stability on a same power system. We propose here to compare rSFCL and iSFCL when a fault occurs in a simple high voltage (HV) power system (IEEE 3 bus test system). To evaluate the impact of SFCL in the studied power system, time domain approach is used to evaluate the short-circuit current in the electrical power system by solving the differential equations of such circuit configuration for various SFCL impedance. For the transient stability study, authors use an approach based on the equal area criterion to evaluate the critical clearing angle (CCA) and a time domain approach to evaluate the critical clearing time (CCT) for the two types of SFCL. Results show that the two SFCLs have different impacts on the power system. However, the resistive SFCL appears to be the more suitable to limit the fault current and to increase the transient stability of the power system in case of short-circuit. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.