Nondetection index of anti-islanding passive protection of synchronous distributed generators

Synchronous distributed generators are prone to operate islanded after contingencies, which usually is not allowed due to safety and power quality issues. Thus, there are several anti-islanding techniques; however, most of them present technical limitations so that they are likely to fail in certain situations. Therefore, it is important to quantify and determine whether the scheme under study is adequate or not. In this context, this paper proposes an index to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-islanding frequency-based relays commonly used to protect synchronous distributed generators. The method is based on the calculation of a numerical index that indicates the time period that the system is unprotected against islanding considering the global period of analysis. Although this index can precisely be calculated based on several electromagnetic transient simulations, a practical method is also proposed to calculate it directly from simple analytical formulas or look-up tables. The results have shown that the proposed approach can assist distribution engineers to assess and set anti-islanding protection schemes.