A strategy for protection of high voltage systems using resistive superconducting fault current limiters

Highlights: • Use of Superconducting Fault Current Limiter (SFCL) to protect voltages systems. • Optimized design of the SFCL allows recovery under load. • Short recovery time (lower than 1 s). - Abstract: This work describes an use of a resistive superconducting fault current limiter (R-SFCL) device based on second generation high temperature superconductors tapes (2G tapes), using a thermal-electrical analogy method to represent heat exchanges. The considered SFCL is supposed to be inserted into the coupling point of a new generation unit to a 12 bar CIGRE benchmark transmission system. The strategy is the investigation of the limitation performance in the high voltage grid by connecting the SFCL at medium voltage grid. We evaluated the performance of the SFCL through the analysis of two cases of faults in different points of the system. Results show that a correct design of the SFCL may effectively limit the contribution of fault currents in the high voltage side. Additionally, it was possible to investigate the behavior of the device internal variables such as the temperature of the superconducting layers for the different cases studied.