Abstract:
Distributed Generation (DG) is popularly used to improve the reliability, stability and voltage profile of a power system. In addition to the improvement, it arises problem in the protection of Distribution Network (DN) of power system. When investigating DG in to the power distribution system (DS), the radial nature of the network alters and the power starts to flow in reverse direction. In addition to the reverse flow of power, the DG upsurges the fault current level that affects the existing time intermission coordination of the protective overcurrent relay. This study proposes reverse power relay (RPR) and the Fault Current Limiter (FCL) to mitigate the fault current level and reverse power flow in a DN with connection of DG. The FCL works only as unidirectional fault current limiter (UFCL), which restrictions the flow of fault current that can be occurred in the main grid to the DG. However, FCL can protect the flow of fault current from main grid to DG, it affects the operational flexibility and reliability of DG. To overcome the flow of fault current to the DG, the study proposes RPR that monitors the flow power to the DG. Collectively this thesis focuses on the protection of radial DS using RPR and UFCL. The analysis and the modeling is conducted on the 15KV DN of the radial feeder in Debre Markos DN. The fault current level after the integration of solar and wind DG is mitigated by UFCL as 0.886 KA for 3Φ fault, 0.654 KA for LG fault, 0.771 KA for LL fault and 0.825 KA for LLG fault. The mitigation technique limits 0.325KA for three phase fault, 0.269KA for LG fault, 0.287KA for LL fault and 0.308KA for DLG faults and the RPR is integrated at the point of mutual connection of DG and DN. The 3Φ fault analysis (which is sever than others) is done to validate the protection capability of the second mitigation technique which is RPR. From the analysis, the maximum level of reverse current before the integration of RPR is 1.211KA and it is tripped after 0.8second with a minimum value fault current level of 0.414KA. After the integration of RPR, the reverse current level is decreased to 1.002KA (which is about 17.26%) for its maximum and 0.383KA (which is about 7.49%) for its minimum reverse current. The circuit breaker is tripped after 0.6 second. Therefore, the integration of RPR is coordinated to the main circuit breaker to trip lesser than time before the circuit breaker is tripped and minimized by 0.2seconds. Thus this second mitigation practice indicates that integration of DG into DN with RPR is a good mitigating technique and the tripping time of circuit breaker is improved from 0.8second to 0.6 seconds. As the tripping time is improved (which is minimum duration of fault happened) the damaged equipment is decreased. The cost effectiveness of the required DG size with RPR and UFCL are also inspected and the payback period has become nearly three years.