A Surgeless Solid-State DC Circuit Breaker for Voltage-Source-Converter-Based HVDC Systems

This paper proposes a dc circuit breaker for voltage source converter (VSC) based high-voltage dc transmission (HVDC) systems. Technical challenges for applying dc circuit breakers are to increase blocking voltage and to suppress surge voltage at the current clearing. The proposed dc circuit breaker is a solid-state breaker which consists of a number of semiconductor devices in series. It maintains equal voltage balancing among the devices to apply it to high-voltage applications. Moreover, the surge voltage across the circuit breaker is reduced by employing a freewheeling diode. Considering a system rated at 300 MW in power and 250 kV in dc voltage, the conduction loss of the proposed circuit breaker is estimated to be 0.045% of the rated power. The value is smaller than the power loss of the VSCs. A downscaled HVDC system rated at 10 kW in power and 360 V in dc voltage was built and tested. A series of experimental results demonstrates the dc fault clearing and rapid restoration of power transmission.