Principal component based passive islanding detection technique for distributed generations

This paper presents a new technique for islanding detection using the phase angle between positive-sequence voltage and current signals. In order to discriminate between islanding and non-islanding situations, the phase angle derived at the rotating machine or inverter-based distributed generation terminal is used an input feature vector for the principal component technique. The change in principal components are prominent for both islanding situations and non-islanding situations like the fault type, load switching, DG tripping, capacitor switching and feeder disconnection. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated using the data simulated with a Real-Time Digital Simulator for IEEE 13-bus microgrids. Critical issues such as a perfect power match islanding situations, different scenarios of microgrids having synchronous generator, BESS, DFIG, and PV units are addressed during performance evaluation of the proposed technique. It is found that, the technique identifies the islanding situations under low active and reactive power mismatches and hence overcomes the non-detection zone problem.