An Adaptive Operating Characteristic to Improve the Operation Stability of Percentage Differential Protection

Based on the comprehensive analyses of the existing current differential protection criterion, a new type of adaptive restraint coefficient-based criterion is put forward in line with a variety of fault conditions. The restraint coefficient of this criterion can be adaptively adjusted according to the operation and fault conditions of the system. In this case, this criterion can guarantee the stability of the protection during external faults. Taking into account the increasing applications of current differential protection in the extremely high voltage or even ultra-high voltage transmission systems, the work performed in this paper is provided with better performance in the case of external faults and various high-resistance internal faults than the existing criterion. Hence, it is promising to apply the current differential protection for 750-kV and above transmission lines. Using Electromagnetic Transients Program software, a simulation model based on 750-kV transmission lines in the Northwest China power grid is established to validate the proposed scheme. All of the real data are provided by the utility of the Northwest China power grid and China Northwest Electric Power Design Institute. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has satisfactory operation performance.