Hardware Implementation and Validation of a Protection Scheme Based on Local Measurements for Self-Healing Microgrids

Self-healing techniques based solely on local measurements can be employed to locate and isolate a fault in self-assembled microgrids that are reliant on inverter-based resources. This paper illustrates self-healing approaches by implementing control algorithms onto hardware and successful restoration of the microgrids based on local measurements in real-time. The control hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) framework utilizes multiple Raspberry Pi (R-pi) controllers with each R-pi controller representing a relay in the real microgrid and an Opal-RT simulator to run the microgrid in real-time. Each R-pi operates based on local measurements only, with no communication between any two relays. The performance of self-healing algorithms in real-time, HIL environment has been compared with offline simulations, followed by a discussion on the challenges with the HIL setups. Finally, the paper assesses the impact of these issues on the effectiveness of self-healing operation in real-time compared to offline runs and provides guidance on mitigating these challenges.