Performance of breaker technologies for LVDC electrical distribution protection and selectivity: building use case

Low-voltage direct current (LVDC) is growing as disruptive alternative to conventional low voltage AC solutions for integrating native DC sources and loads. This trend is most noticeable in greenfield data centers, commercial or tertiary building. As a new strategy for the development of the electrical distribution system, it requires a rethinking of the overall system design approach, with a particular focus on the protection scheme and selectivity. This paper illustrates the approach for setting up an efficient protection scheme with a LVDC building case study. Depending on the converter technologies used, various protection schemes and selectivity principles will be examined, and their performance evaluated. Through this analysis, the paper intends to dri ve the optimization of the LVDC system, where a compromise needs to be found between converter fault tolerance and the constraints they impose on the protection system.