A practical method for assessing the effectiveness of vector surge relays for distributed generation applications

This paper presents a simple and reliable method for predicting the islanding detection performance of vector surge relays. The relay performance is characterized by a tripping-time versus power-imbalance curve. With the curve, one can determine the time taken by a vector surge relay to detect islanding for any generation-load mismatch level. The main contribution of this paper is the development of analytical formulas for directly determining the behavior of vector surge relays. As a result, efforts needed to asses the relay performance for a given distributed generation scheme can be simplified significantly. The accuracy of the formulas has been verified by extensive simulation study results.