FEN ESCape

  Overview of DC Protection Schemes Copyright: © PGS

The ESCape project aims to develop a unified protection architecture for DC grids at system and component level. For DC grids in low and medium voltage, protection concepts that guarantee safe operation at least at the safety level of today's AC grids are indispensable. A mature protection architecture for intelligent energy supply grids, especially DC grids of the future, is the key to the broad acceptance and market penetration of such grids. For the necessary protection architecture, requirements based on application scenarios must be developed and the individual protection components, as well as the higher-level coordination of all components involved in the protection, must be adapted to these requirements. Furthermore, the individual errors must be automatically detected, localized and released. In turn, reliable protection components are required for the clarification of the errors, depending on the requirements of the network used.

 

Goals

  • Development of a generally valid protection architecture and the resulting requirements for the individual protection components and coordination
  • Research of control strategies for fault current limitation of different converter topologies for a DC network
  • Development of hybrid circuit-breakers for DC grids
  • Research into protection strategies and algorithms for higher-level system-wide protection
 

Solution

  • Offline and real-time simulation of control strategies for fault current limitation of different inverter topologies
  • Development and construction of a fault emulator for DC mains faults for testing fault current-limiting control strategies
  • Design and detailed experimental characterization of a special hybrid circuit breaker
  • Research into algorithms for the coordination of protection components, fault detection and fault isolation

The ESCape project is being funded as part of the 2nd funding phase of FEN research campus and with the support of the jury of the funding initiative "Research Campus - Public-Private Partnership for Innovation" of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) over a period of five years.

 
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Projectpartners: ABB, Hitachi Energy, Maschinenfabrik Rheinhausen, Leadrive, Infineon

Funding: BMBF