A Study on Application of Superconducting Fault Current Limiter (SFCL) in Smart Grid

Nowadays, the main energy supplier of the worldwide economy is fossil fuel. However has led to many problems such as global warming and air pollution. Therefore, with regard to the worldwide trend of green energy, solar power technology has become one of the most promising energy resources. Smart grid will integrate modern communication technologies and renewable energy resources into the future power grid, in order to supply more efficient, reliable, resilient and responsive electric power. In this paper, an application of superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL) is proposed to limit the fault current that occurs in power system, SFCL is a device that uses superconductors to instantaneously limit or reduce unanticipated electrical surges that may occur on utility distribution and transmission networks. Due to the difficulty in power network reinforcement and the interconnection of more distributed generations, fault current level has become a serious problem in transmission and distribution system operations. The utilization of fault current limiters (FCLs) in power system provides an effective way to suppress fault currents and result in considerable saving in the investment of high capacity circuit breakers is felt. In this work, a resistive type SFCL model was implemented by integrating Simulink and SimPowerSystem blocks in Matlab. The designed SFCL model could be easily utilized for determining an impedance level of SFCL according to the fault-current-limitation requirements of various kinds of the smart grid system.Three phase faults have been simulated at different locations in smart grid and the effect of the SFCL and its location on the wind farm fault current was evaluated. Smart grid with combination of PV cell and Wind farm is also considered and the performance of PV cell with three phase faults at different locations is also evaluated. Consequently, the optimum arrangement of the SFCL location in Smart Grid with renewable resources has been proposed and its remarkable performance has been suggested.