Design and test of a magnetic saturation-type fault current limiter

Fault current limiter (FCL) is an effective technique for the fault isolation and protection in the direct current (DC) grid. In this study, a magnetic saturation-type FCL is designed and tested. Firstly, its basic principle is introduced. Compared with the traditional saturable reactor-type FCL, it has advantages of simple structure, small size, and better economy. Then design procedure of the magnetic saturation-type FCL is described, which includes selection of the ferromagnetic materials and determination of parameters of the iron core. After that, a set of principle prototype is designed, and the experiment and simulation are carried out to verify the current limiting ability of the magnetic saturation-type FCL. Results show that the magnetic saturation-type FCL can effectively limit the fault current from 110 to 40A. What is more, the new magnetic saturation-type FCL can be extended from changing the size of a single core and the distributed arrangement for large-capacity applications.