Comparison between saturated-iron core and shielded-iron core superconducting fault current limiters on recloser-fuse coordination of radial distribution systems connected with distributed generation

Abstract Recently, distributed generators (DGs) are being largely amalgamated with radial distribution systems because of their positive impacts on these systems such as voltage profile improvement and power loss minimization. However, if this integration is not well-planned, it can lead to serious problems in the protection devices. One of these problems is the recloser-fuse miscoordination. This paper presents an effective solution to the recloser-fuse miscoordination due to DGs integration with RDS. The proposed approach is based on suppressing the DG current during fault period so that the contribution of DG to the fault current becomes minimal. Two types of superconducting fault current limiters (SFCLs) namely, saturated iron-core and shielded iron-core SFCLs are studied and a comparison between their performance is presented. The proposed solution was implemented on IEEE 33-bus RDS. All simulation studies are performed on MATLAB script. The simulation results illustrated that saturated iron-core SFCL could not recover recloser-fuse coordination in some of the studied cases. However, shielded iron-core SFCL could successfully restore the recloser-fuse coordination in all the studied cases. This shows that shielded iron-core SFCL is preferred in solving recloser-fuse miscoordination.