Empirical mode decomposition based algorithm for islanding detection in micro-grids

Owning to extensively enhancement of renewable energy resources in the distribution grids, the employment of such sources is also associated with various issues such as the islanding problem. In this paper, an effective method has been proposed for detection of the islanding in the micro-grids comprised of inverter or direct fed types of distributed generations. The proposed method is designed based on the intrinsic modes of the voltage signal measured at the PCC point. More specifically, through the calculation of the positive sequence of the voltage signal variation (PSVSV) and extracting the signal energy of PSVSV's intrinsic modes, the islanding can be detected. The superiority of the proposed islanding detection method is manifested in the condition where the generation of distributed resources is in balance with the loading consumption. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated considering the conditions where islanding is difficult to detect or might be mistaken with other phenomena given by loads within the NDZ region, different fault types, and loads with different power factors. The performance evaluation has been carried out through simulations, and furthermore has been compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.