International Journal of Physical Sciences Vol. 2(2), pp. 021-031, February 2014 ISSN 2331-1827 ©2014 Academe Research Journals

Full Length Research Paper

Isolated condition detection based on voltage analysis for renewable energy

Mehdi Noushyar * and Behrouz Sobhany

Technical Engineering Department, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil, Iran.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: mnooshyar@yahoo.com.

Accepted 24 February, 2014

Abstract

The increasing electrical power demand has caused Distributed Generations (DGs) to enter into the power systems which created many problems in power systems. One of these problems is unwanted islanding phenomenon. Personnel and equipment safety are the main reasons concerning which this condition should be detected in the fastest possible time. A novel passive islanding detection algorithm based on histogram analysis for wind turbines is presented in this paper. The proposed method measured the voltage signal of wind turbine and detected islanding condition based on its sum square error. The sampling window was selected from system time constant in islanding mode for reliable and fast detection. One of the big disadvantages of passive detection methods is threshold value of these methods. In order to overcome this drawback, the threshold value in this study was determined using thresholding algorithm. The presented studies are based on time-domain simulations using MATLAB. The results’ evaluation confirms that the proposed islanding detection method succeeds in detecting islanding mode from other switching conditions.

Key words: Islanding detection, wind turbine, passive method, distributed generation.