Incorporating Conductor Damage Constraint for Adaptive Protection Optimization in Distribution Networks

Distribution networks are becoming more dynamic with the increased penetration of renewable energy resources and expanded microgrid capabilities to promote reliability during major weather events. Adaptive protection is a viable solution for such networks that have a wide range of available fault current across different system configurations. Adaptive protection algorithms ensure coordination between protective devices. However, they do not typically consider constraints for protective device operating time to guarantee equipment is not damaged during a fault. This paper focuses on conductor protection by incorporating time-to-damage as an additional constraint to the adaptive protection optimization problem. The proposed approach is applied to the IEEE 123 bus test system modeled in ®. Conductors are successfully protected in all cases studied, with a minimal impact on the average optimization runtime.