Protection design and coordination of DC Distributed Power Systems Architectures

In this paper, a complete protection system for a DC distribution system was developed and presented. The developed protection scheme was designed to be implemented on the laboratory-based DC Distributed Power Systems Architecture (DPSA) testbed setup. This system consists of four AC generators in addition to a DC microgrid involving photovoltaic generation and battery storage. The total capacity of the DPSA is 72 kW. The developed protection scheme targets faults on the AC side as well as faults on the DC sides. Moreover, the coordination scheme between different types of faults was designed. The challenges associated with protecting DC systems such as arcing and system time constant were investigated. The results obtained verify the validity of the developed protection system.