An Experimental Study of Low-Current DC Series Arc Faults for Condition Monitoring Purpose

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CIRED 2019 - 1075.pdf (661.97 KB)

Paper number

1075

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Conference name

CIRED 2019

Conference date

3-6 June 2019

Conference location

Madrid, Spain

Peer-reviewed

Yes

Short title

Convener

Authors

Lu, Shibo, University of New South Wales, Australia
Chai, Hua, University of New South Wales, Australia
Phung, B. T., University of New South Wales, Australia
Zhang, Daming, University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

DC arc faults present a challenging protection problem in DC systems, such as photovoltaic and electric vehicle supply systems. Incidents of DC arc faults in DC systems are becoming more common especially for series arc faults, and if undetected, would finally cause severe damage to the systems. This paper studies DC series arc fault characteristics including quasi-stationary V-I characteristic and arc current spectrum characteristic. Based on experimental tests, the impacts of different load current levels, DC operating voltage levels, air gap lengths on arc current and its spectrum are investigated and evaluated. A new method based on wavelet packet decomposition combined with entropy theory has been developed to extract the common features of arc signals under different conditions. It is found that arc fault currents share some common wavelet-packet entropy in different bandwidths even if the fault conditions are different. The results provide better characterization of DC arcing phenomena and help to develop more effective detection algorithms.

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Publisher

AIM

Date

2019-06-03

Published in

CIRED 2019 Conference

Permanent link to this record

https://cired-repository.org/handle/20.500.12455/277
http://dx.doi.org/10.34890/507

ISSN

2032-9644

ISBN

978-2-9602415-0-1