Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) Grounding System

The main focus of this research will be to develop effective modeling toolboxes to analyze CM current/voltage behaviors and fault conditions at any part of the power system in a cost and time effective way. The toolbox will assist with grounding strategies and enhance the baseline design. A CM equivalent circuit model [3] has been developed to analyze the CM current/voltage behaviors. In this work, the CM model will be expended and enhanced by adding component circuits to represent the entire ship power system that including multiple sources and loads. Also, it will incorporate frequency domain analysis of the common mode impedance to represent the distributed elements of the DC bus. , the proposed modeling toolboxes will be expended and further developed to analyze the fault current/voltage behaviors at any part of the system. Hardware testing of the fault conditions will be performed in the PES lab. Development will consist of wide frequency ranges, optimizing the grounding impedance, and evaluating different topology variants of the baseline grounding system design. In addition, techniques will be studied to minimize the impact of DC faults in MVDC systems without the use of DC circuit breakers