Hardware Implementation and Real-Time Evaluation of an ANN-Based Algorithm for Anti-Islanding Protection of Distributed Generators

Recently, it has been verified by simulation results that the ability of recognizing and classifying patterns by artificial neural network can be successfully used for anti-islanding protection of distributed synchronous generators. However, since this type of protection differs from the available commercial relays, it is important to test the algorithm performance implemented in hardware. So, this paper presents a performance evaluation of the hardware implementation of an ANN-based algorithm for anti-islanding protection of distributed generators. For the evaluation process, a complete digital relay architecture is developed in LabVIEW, thus allowing its implementation in the commercial real-time platform cRIO-9025/cRIO-9018. The proposed scheme is tested under real conditions by means of the CMC-256-plus test set, as performed for conventional intelligent electronic devices. The proposed algorithm implemented in hardware shows high effectiveness, detecting all islanding conditions within 1 s, sharing the same good performance verified by computational simulations. The algorithm implementation shows robustness, as it remains blocked for other power grid disturbances, such as frequency variation in the grid utility, massive connection or load relief.