Development of HVDC circuit breaker with fast interruption speed

With the growing number of large-capacity renewable energy sources such as offshore wind farms and the growing demand for long distance power transmission, the interest in HVDC, which provides excellent transmission efficiency, has also been significantly increasing. One recent trend in relation to this is that there are many on-going research projects on VSC HVDC rather than CSC. To run a DC-grid based on VSC stably, however, it is necessary to have a circuit breaker that can isolate a fault section when it occurs. This study proposed a novel HVDC circuit breaker suitable to DC grid. The proposed HVDC circuit breaker features bi-directional conduction and interruption, and can interrupt a high current in a very short time. It can also be made at lower prices than other HVDC circuit breakers. This study described the operation of the proposed HVDC circuit breaker and verified its performance through simulation, prototype fabrication and experiments.