High voltage direct current transmission based on a modular multilevel converter (MMC-HVDC) is an effective method to solve the grid connection of the new energy. A DC fault is an issue that must be solved for MMC-HVDC. This paper proposes a protectio...
High voltage direct current transmission based on a modular multilevel converter (MMC-HVDC) is an effective method to solve the grid connection of the new energy. A DC fault is an issue that must be solved for MMC-HVDC. This paper proposes a protection scheme for HVDC converters to quickly suppress DC fault current without increasing the operation loss. By employing a bypass arm in conjunction with a switch-type zero-loss current limiter (SZCL), most of the DC current in the bridge arm fl ows through the bypass arm so the fault current of the power devices is reduced. There are a number of main advantages of this scheme. The fault isolation time can be greatly shortened, the cost of the system is effectively reduced, the steady-state operation loss of the system does not increase, the operation of the AC-grid can be maintained stably when a DC fault occurs, and the overcurrent impulse to the AC-grid is reduced. The proposed scheme is applicable to two-terminal systems and the DC grid, especially for faults at the converter outlet of the DC grid. Simulation results using PSCAD/EMTDC show the superiority of the proposed scheme when compared with other schemes and a comparison of the costs shows the feasibility of the proposed scheme in practical applications.