Adaptive Z2 Protection Scheme Based on Setting Groups for Distance Relaying of Wind Farms Integrated Power Systems

Using doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) based onshore wind farms in power systems may lead to mal-operation of the second zone (Z2) of distance protection due to the uncertain number of available wind turbines on the one hand and the function of DFIGs control system to maintain the bus voltage on the other hand. In such cases, variable injected current by the wind farm causes distance relay fall in trouble to distinguish whether the fault point is in the Z2 operating area or not. In the current study, an adaptive settings scheme is proposed to determine the Z2 setting value of distance relays for such cases. The proposed method is based on the adaptive approach and the settings group facility of the commercial relays. The proposed method applies the k-means clustering approach to decrease the number of setting values calculated by the adaptive approach to the number of applicable settings group in the distance relay and uses the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms to achieve the optimum setting values. The high accuracy of the proposed method in comparison with other methods, suggested in the literatures, is shown by applying them to the IEEE 14-bus grid.