A pilot protection based on low frequency component model for HVDC transmission lines

Abstract Reliable and fast identification of high‐voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line faults is important to the safety of power system. In traditional DC transmission line protection, differential protection is invulnerable to high fault resistance, but it needs long time delay for the influence of distributed capacitance current. In order to solve this problem, a novel pilot protection is proposed. The characteristics of the voltage and current processed by low‐pass filter under different fault conditions are analysed, and based on it the protection criteria is proposed. When external fault occurs, it reflects the line capacitance where the first forward fault traveling wave passes, which is increasing until equal to the whole line capacitance, then remains constant. However, when internal fault occurs, its value is negative in the initial stage, and after that its value is very different from the whole line capacitance. The analysis proves that this pilot protection method has fast operation speed, and can be applied for a relatively long period of time. What is more, the applicable time of superposition principle is considered in the analysis, which is not considered in many literatures. An UHVDC system is modelled for simulation in PSCAD/EMTDC, and the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified.