A novel fault detection method for VSC-HVDC transmission system of offshore wind farm

•A novel and reliable method to detect faults in VSC-HVDC transmission system.•The method uses signals obtained from cable sheath to analyze system conditions.•The method is capable of detecting different DC faults and AC faults nearby.

VSC-HVDC transmission system is going to become the most economical way of power delivery for large and remote offshore wind farms. An accurate and fast fault detection method is necessary to protect sensitive devices of these systems and maintain uninterrupted power delivery. This paper investigates an innovative technique for recognizing DC zone faults including HVDC cable faults and unbalancing of DC capacitor bank. Sheath voltage is presented as a novel criterion for detecting abnormal situations in the system. Transient voltage of cable sheath and Wavelet transform are used to identify different types of DC faults. Extensive simulation examples are performed on EMTDC–PSCAD platform and post-processed using MATLAB. The results illustrate that the proposed technique gives a robust performance and can be applied to protection scheme of offshore wind farms.