Study on transient overvoltage of offshore wind farm considering different electrical characteristics of Vacuum Circuit Breaker

Abstract

For the study of transient overvoltage (TOV) in an offshore wind farm (OWF) collector system caused by switching off vacuum circuit breakers (VCBs), a simplified experimental platform of OWF medium-voltage (MV) cable collector system was established in this paper to conduct switching operation tests of VCB and obtain the characteristic parameters for VCB, especially dielectric strength parameters; also, the effectiveness of the VCB reignition model was verified. Then, PSCAD/EMTDC was used to construct the MV collector system of the OWF, and the effects of normal switching and fault switching on TOV amplitude, steepness, and the total number of reignition of the VCB were studied, respectively, with the experimental parameters and traditional parameters of dielectric strength of the VCB. The simulation results show that when the VCB is at the tower bottom, the overvoltage amplitude generated by the normal switching is the largest, which is 1.83 p.u., and the overvoltage steepness of the fault switching is the largest, up to 142 kV/μs. The overvoltage amplitude and steepness caused by switching off VCB at the tower bottom faultily with traditional parameters are about 2 and 1.5 times of the experimental parameters under the same operating condition.