A Probabilistic Approach for the Evaluation of Fault Detection Schemes in Microgrids

An important challenge in protection of a microgrid is the process of fault detection, considering the uncertainties in its topologies. Equally important is the evaluation of proposed methods as their incorrect performances could result in unreasonable power outages. In this paper, a new fault detection and characterization method is introduced and evaluated subject to the uncertainties of network topologies. The features of three-phase components together with the positive, negative and zero sequences of current and voltage waveforms are derived to detect the occurrence of a fault, its location, type and the engaged phases. The proposed method is independent of the microgrid topology. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method in various network topologies, a Monte Carlo scheme is developed. This is done by computing the expected energy not-supplied reliability index and the percentage of successful performance of the fault detection. Simulation results show that the proposed method can detect faults in various microgrid topologies with a very high degree of accuracy