An Improved DC Circuit Breaker with Enhanced Energy Recovery Efficiency for Renewable Energy Application

Abstract

The DC grid has been drawing significant attention due to the rapid development of renewable energy sources. But it has a major limitation regarding protection. The fault current rises very abruptly because of low system impedance. DC circuit breakers are widely accepted mechanisms to address this issue. DC grids have large network inductance, which stores energy during current conduction. Conventional DCCB uses a lossy network to dissipate the stored energy in terms of heat to perform successful current breaking. Recently, a topology was proposed that can store current-breaking energy from the network inductance and feed it back to the source instead of dissipating it. This paper will introduce a highly efficient DC circuit breaker (HEDCCB) topology that can recover the current breaking energy very efficiently, with a recovery efficiency 85.61%. PSIM simulation software is used to evaluate the performance parameters of the proposed circuit breaker. The performance comparisons of proposed and conventional topologies are also presented in this paper.