Offshore renewable energy, including offshore wind and marine (wave and tidal), is a potential sustainable supply to

the future energy demand. To integrate offshore renewable energy, subsea DC grids are necessary. However,
protection of such grids against any low impedance fault is a challenging task and is dependent on developing
reliable DC circuit breaker (DCCB). Three families of DCCBs have been studied to date including Mechanical
DCCBs, fast Semiconductor based DCCBs, and Superconductor cable embedded DCCBs. The mechanical DCCBs
are capable of interrupting very high DC currents within several tens of milliseconds, but they are too slow to fulfil the
requirement of a reliable DC grid. Semiconductor based DC breakers can easily overcome the limitations in operation
speed but generate large transfer losses, and have not been commercialised yet. The third solution employs fault
current limiters based on superconductor cables and circuit breakers to form a Superconducting Cable embedded
high power DC Circuit Breaker (SCCB). The superconducting offers zero to near zero resistance to the flow of DC
electrical current, which can reduce losses to the minimum (almost no loss) and improve the overall system
efficiency.
In this PhD project the three methods of DC fault isolation will be studied mainly in system level. Advantage and
disadvantage of each approach will be identified and the limitations of application in large offshore DC grids will be
explored. Additionally, fast, reliable, and discriminative DC fault detection within a large mesh DC grid is to be
investigated. This is of great importance for secure DC fault isolation in which minimum sections of the DC grid are
isolated in the event of the DC fault. To date, differential method has been proposed which will be used as a
benchmark in this study. It mainly suffers from long delays due to communication links between different relays when
long transmission lines are used.
Main Objectives are: (1) to explore state of the art technology in either of the proposed DCCBs; (2) to evaluate and
improve on the latest technologies proposed so far for DC fault isolation with the aim of better efficiency, lower cost,
higher reliability, and performance particularly in harsh offshore environment; (3) to study DC fault detection
technique in a large mesh DC grid; and (4) to design protection systems based on studied technologies and evaluate
DCCBs performance on offshore DC grids.