Resilience Enhancement Aimed Adaptive Identification of Arc Fault in Distribution System

The gradually increased proportion of power electronic devices and the distributed energy resource (DER), in the distribution network, induced more harmonic and pulse signals to be injected into the grid. Arc faults, as the critical and common faults in the distribution system, are the potential reasons for the safety of the personnel and equipment. Furthermore, intensely chaotic characteristics of the arc current and the harmonic generated from the power electronic devices pollute the fault signature, which may cause misjudgment or malfunctions of arc detection devices. Therefore, to identify the arc fault rapidly and accurately, this article starts with the mechanism of the arc formation. It analyzes the fault signature with resistive, inductive, and capacitive loads to reduce the detection of blind spots. Then, the time-frequency is utilized to analyze the fault current of each load type to capture the common feature in the frequency domain. Comparing multiple tests shows that the proposed approach can accurately and robustly identify the arc fault in different operation conditions.