Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) Fault Detection, Localization, and Isolation

Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) is an attractive power system option for commercial and naval ships. However, the lack of a comprehensive design strategy for MVDC circuit protection is a barrier to implementation. For a range of MVDC architectures, this paper explores the inter-relationships among the different functionalities that isolation devices can have, the technologies for implementing isolation devices, power quality requirements, protective relaying strategies, source design, load design, and energy storage. Because commercial products implementing the technologies do not currently exist for MVDC applications, their costs cannot be determined and therefore the optimal solution cannot yet be determined.