A novel arrangement for improving three phase saturated-core fault current limiter (SCFCL)

Fault current limiter (FCL) is a device that has low impedance in normal state of the power network and has simultaneous large impedance in the time of fault, so that it would lead to limitation of the fault current. Among the various technologies of the FCL, the saturated core FCL (SCFCL) type is remarkably favourable. A SCFCL would limit fault current due to the feature of changing in the impedance of the FCL between the linear region and saturation region of B-H curve of the cores. The basic problem of usage of this type of FCL is high volume, heavy weight and expensive cost of configuration; which so far there have been done some researches and practical projects in order to solve this problem. In this paper, a new arrangement of SCFCL has been presented, which would notably cause an improvement and optimization in volume and total cost of SCFCL. To analyse the proper performance of this configuration, a small prototype based on this arrangement has been designed for Power System Hardware Model of University of Tehran. First, this arrangement has simulated with finite element method (FEM) in COMSOL Multi-Physics software for observing transient magnetic behaviour. In addition, to validate the correct performance of SCFCL, the constructed prototype has been tested in the laboratory. The obtained experiment results of the SCFCL demonstrate a satisfying accordance with the expected designing results.