Fast and Sensitive Nonunit Protection Method for HVDC Grids Using Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm

High voltage DC (HVDC) grids have raised high-speed operation and high reliability requirement for relay protection. This paper aims at proposing a protection scheme with high operation speed, high sensitivity, and high reliability. Firstly, the symbolic expressions of the line-mode fault component traveling wave in case of the internal and external faults are derived, which consist of the traveling wave propagation term and the DC line boundary term. It is theoretically demonstrated that (i) the index of the traveling wave propagation term in case of internal faults is greater than that for the external faults, and (ii) the index is independent of fault impedance. Secondly, the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm is introduced to extract the index and an index-based non-unit protection method as well as the protection scheme is proposed. The proposed method is theoretically robust and independent of fault impedance and fault type. In the validation, the fitting results have indicated that the symbolic expressions are correct and the extracted indices are effective to characterize the location of the faults. Numerous fault cases of different fault distances, fault impedances, and fault types have demonstrated that the proposed protection scheme has high sensitivity, high operation speed, and high reliability.