Management and control of arcing faults for a simplified Navy ship power system

The modern Navy shipboard power system needs a faster, automated fault detection, location and control scheme in order to promote the Navy's efficiency and capability to withstand different operating conditions brought about as a result of arcing fault. This exploratory effort is aimed at developing a technique for arc fault control on the Navy Integrated Power System (IPS). The developed technique takes advantage of a rule based method to isolate the fault and bring the system back to normalcy.; The research involves development of power system models of the IPS, development of a special load flow methodology for the IPS, and arcing modeling and analysis as well as computation of parameters due to the physics of the network is obtained. The results of the load flow and arcing computation as well as the external parameters served as input to the rule based control. The rule based control makes decision on what type of control action should be performed given the effects of the arcing fault at any particular time and the criticality of the loads being served at various parts of the power system. Evaluation of the scheme is performed through load flow and stability assessments which compare the three conditions of the IPS (pre-arcing, arcing without control, and arcing with control conditions). The rule based control is unique due to the methodology adopted and the techniques of the control application.; The control methodology has been tested on a reduced IPS test system with the scope for further validation using the full IPS or other similar Navy ship power systems.