IoT-Enabled Traveling Wave Microgrid Protection

Traveling wave protection based on the Internet of Things (TWP-IoT) is developed to enable ultraresilient microgrids. TWP-IoT adopts a directional traveling wave (TW) approach that utilizes the voltage and current modal components obtained from discrete Hilbert transform (DHT) to identify the fault features via ultralightweight IoT hardware. The main contributions of this work include 1) a novel TWP-IoT for microgrid and distribution networks that can achieve the time-of-arrival fault detection and localization with composite wave impedance and conductance using DHT; 2) a cost-effective smart IoT prototype with functionalities outperforming commercial relays; and 3) a real-time hardware-in-the-loop prototype based on real time digital simulator that verifies the robustness and efficacy of TWP-IoT subject to a diverse set of working conditions. TWP-IoT is found to have excellent performance under a wide spectrum of internal and external fault conditions across a myriad of microgrid locations, which is unattainable by today’s TWP products.