Colloquia

Summary

The maritime sector continues developing towards a more sustainable means of marine transportation and strives to find suitable solutions to enable this movement from traditional AC to new DC systems. Recent trends show that the tide is now changing rapidly and the developments in power electronics have enabled the application of reliable DC systems on new or refitted ships. Although there are multiple benefits, generic standards regarding the application of these DC systems are absent and there is still much debate about the proper protection strategies to ensure power in all situations. Selectivity is one important requirement of a power system's design, in the case when a short-circuit occurs, the system must detach the faulty circuit almost instantly while the remaining part of the system is unaffected. This imposes a major challenge in DC applications compared to AC. This research dives deeper into the behaviour of a DC system and its components during a short-circuit. A modular model is created for two specific configurations, built and tested to verify the results of the models. These models simulate short-circuit currents and enable the user to analyze whether a proposed system is selective.