Digital Ground Fault Protection of Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems

The growing interests in utilizing Photovoltaic (PV) systems are usually faced with challenges of accurate and reliable protection of these distributed generation units. A desired protection of PV systems has to effectively and accurately detect and respond to internal faults (within the PV system) and external faults (in the host grid and/or fed loads). This paper presents and tests the performance of a digital ground fault protection (DGFP) for grid-connected PV systems. The presented DGFP detects faults based on the energy contents of high frequency sub-bands of the ground current. These energy contents are extracted using the phaselet transform that can process signals with non-stationary variations in their phases. Energy contents of the high frequency sub-bands can provide accurate, fast, and reliable detection and identification of faults experienced by a PV system operated. The phaselet-transform (PHT)-based DGFP is implemented for performance testing using PV systems that are operated in the grid-connected mode, and subjected to various fault and non-fault events. Performance results demonstrate accurate, fast, and reliable detection and response to different types of fault and non-fault events. Response features of the PHT-based DGFP are complimented with minor sensitivity to the level of power production and/or type and location of faults.