Impact of solid-state fault current limiters on protection equipment in transmission and distribution systems

Solid-state fault current limiters (SSFCLs) offer a number of benefits when incorporated within transmission and distribution systems. SSFCLs can limit the magnitude of a fault current seen by a system using different methods, such as inserting a large impedance in the current path or controlling the voltage applied to the fault. However, these two methods can introduce a few problems when SSFCLs are used in a system along with other protection equipment such as protective relays and sensors. An experiment was designed and implemented to evaluate the behavior of the protective relays in a mimic distribution system with a SSFCL. This paper introduces the details of the experiment and the result shows that the distorted current and voltage waveforms resulting from the action of the SSFCL disturb the protective equipment.