Power System Protection

Protective relaying is a critical aspect of the electric power grid to provide safe and reliable operation.  Sandia is working to improve power system protection to make it faster and more accurate by developing novel cutting-edge protection techniques. 

• Fault testing of inverters in Sandia’s DETL facility
• Electromagnetic Transient (EMT) simulation and models of inverter-based resources (IBR)
• Advanced microgrid protection schemes for AC, DC, hybrid, and networked microgrids
• Developing, validating, and demonstrating highly reconfigurable communication-based protection schemes, including Adaptive Protection
• Fault location schemes for systems with high IBR penetration
• Traveling wave and very high frequency protection
• Hardware-in-the-loop testing with commercial relays
• Cybersecurity of protection relays
• Development of protection algorithms into ADMS
• Incipient failure detection
• Wildfire ignition prevention
• Incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence into relays
• Co-optimization of power electronics design/controls with protection
• Protection of low-voltage secondary networks