Center for Research in Energy Systems Transformation (CREST)

The electronic circuit breaker used in DC microgrids are required to work within their safe operating areas bounded by temperature, voltage and current limits. Traditional approach managed to protect these switches through rapid current cut-off operations at over-load or fault situations, but failing to avoid the disturbance induced by transient current surges or noises which are not harmful to the grid operations. Aiming to increase the quality of circuit breaker operations and furthermore improve its reliability, this paper proposed a SiC MOSFET based DC circuit breaker based on the variable time-delay protection scheme. The cutoff operations only take place after proper delay time, which are precisely catered according to the transient thermal properties of SiC devices and the properties of DC loads. The proposed scheme has been implemented with hardware prototype and experimentally verified under different fault situations.