Solid-State Circuit Breaker based Smart Distribution Board with IoT Integration

Present-day distribution board is an enclosure comprising of protection devices such as circuit breakers, RCBOs, ELCBs etc. To meet the ever-growing demands of today's electricity grids and to facilitate the addition of Distributed Energy Resource, solar PV panels, electric vehicles to our grid, as well as to increase the reliability and system performance of low voltage distribution board, there necessitates the need to make our distribution panels smarter. In this paper, a novel smart distribution board for low-voltage residential and commercial systems is proposed, using solid-state circuit breaker as the protection device for faster switching operations. The solid-state breaker works with a bi-directional SCR switch along with a low-cost Arduino micro-controller for intelligent control to interrupt extreme currents faster. Smart Distribution board is integrated with IoT based real-time monitoring of current, power and energy of each of the sub-circuits and the user is intimated of any abnormal operation in the sub-circuits, providing scope for better energy management. Home automation at the distribution board makes it convenient and user-friendly. Smart distribution board is self-reliant, self-healing, user-friendly and always connected to the user. Hardware setup of the distribution board was developed using solid-state relay as the breaker to validate the working of IoT based real-time monitoring and home automation system. The performance of the SS CB in the smart distribution board is evaluated using MATLAB Simulink software.