Principle and Control Design of Active Ground-Fault Arc Suppression Device for Full Compensation of Ground Current

Traditional ground-fault arc suppression devices mainly deal with capacitive component of ground current and have weak effect on the active and harmonic ones, which limits the arc suppression performance. The capacitive current detection needed in them suffers from low accuracy and robustness. The commonly-used large-capacity reactive component may bring about overvoltage because of possible resonance with the distributed phase-to-ground capacitance. To solve these problems, an active ground-fault arc suppression device is presented. It employs a topology based on single-phase inverter to inject current into the neutral without any large-capacity reactors, and thus avoids the aforementioned overvoltage. It compensates all the active, reactive and harmonic components of the ground current to reliably extinguish the ground-fault arcs. A dual-loop
voltage control method is proposed to realize arc suppression without capacitive current detection. Its time-based feature also brings the benefit of fast response on ground-fault arc suppression. The principle of full current compensation is analyzed, together with the controller design method of the proposed device. Experiment on a prototype was carried out to validate the effectiveness of the device.