Coordination of Protection and Ride-through Settings for Islanded Facility Microgrids

Proliferation of power electronics and distributed energy resources (DERs) into the electrical power system (EPS) enables improvements to the network’s resilience against sudden-inception short circuit electrical faults through redundant electrical pathways in meshed configurations and multiple possible distributed generation locations. However, successful operation of fault detection, isolation, and recovery in islanded mode is challenging as protection coordination must include not only the distribution equipment, but also the DERs. Assessment of resilience for candidate EPS architectures against short circuit faults must be performed to understand the trade-offs between network resilience and complexity. This paper proposes a design process, which can be used towards assessing microgrid resilience, by coordinating protection and ride-through settings to maximize the recoverability of a meshed islanded AC microgrid. The design process is demonstrated through a case-study.