A Communication-Assisted Protection Strategy for Inverter-Based Medium-Voltage Microgrids

Abstract

This paper proposes a communication-assisted protection strategy implementable by commercially available microprocessor-based relays for the protection of medium-voltage microgrids. Even though the developed protection strategy benefits from communications, it offers a backup protection strategy to manage communication network failures. The paper also introduces the structure of a relay that enables the proposed protection strategy. Comprehensive simulation studies are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed protection strategy under different fault scenarios, in the PSCAD/EMTDC software environment.