Travelling wave pilot protection for LCC-HVDC transmission lines based on electronic transformers' differential output characteristic

Considering travelling wave's bandwidth which varies from several kilohertz to hundreds of kilohertz, traditional current and voltage transformers cannot transfer whole bandwidth of travelling wave. However, electronic transformers, including Rogowski coil based electronic current transformer and capacitance divided electronic voltage transformer, have much wider bandwidth (up to 500 kHz) which could transfer almost whole bandwidth of travelling wave without distortion. Besides, secondary side's output of electronic transformer is the differential signal of primary side. So, the integration circuit can be omitted when using differential travelling wave signal directly in protection principle. Traditional travelling protection for high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines is highly affected by grounding resistance. And the backup protection, such as current differential protection, has long operation time. So the paper proposes a novel travelling wave pilot protection based on the differential output signal of electronic transformers. Differential voltage and current travelling wave have axisymmetric relationship when the fault occurs at forward direction. Conversely, differential voltage and current travelling wave almost overlap when the fault occurs at reverse direction. Considering fault direction identification results of two ends, fault section can be determined. Besides, according to amplitude ratio of fault line and normal line, fault line can be selected correctly. The simulation results in PSCAD/EMTDC prove the correctness, sensitivity and reliability.