Testing a Non-directional Overcurrent Protection Relay: Power-Hardware-in-The Loop Approach

The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) approach is being increasingly recognised and utilised as a highly effective way to bridge the gap between simulation and real conditions. Real-time simulation offers high-performance capabilities to produce high-fidelity results in HIL simulations. Real-time HIL testing is becoming popular in power systems and power electronics applications. This paper presents a real-time HIL implementation for testing the power system protection relay, which can provide the incorporation of physical protection devices within the control loop of the simulation testbed. For this purpose, the test system with a non-directional overcurrent protection relay is designed and simulated in the real-time domain using the Typhoon HIL framework to analyse the protection relay’s performance when subjected to faults and different characteristic settings.