Dr. Marc A. Carbone received a B.S. degree in engineering physics from John Carroll University, Cleveland, OH, in 2014 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in systems and control engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH in 2016 and 2021 respectively. Currently, he is a controls engineer in the power management and distribution branch at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. His research focus is on model-based fault detection and diagnosis in electrical power systems, where he serves as the autonomous power controls team lead. His other research interests include modeling and control of electrical power systems, autonomous systems, and state estimation.
The electric power system (EPS) of modern spacecraft consists of widely distributed energy sources and storage devices that can provide power to the healthy parts of the network during a fault event. Fault localization for highly distributed power systems can add additional complication to standard methods of circuit breaker protection setting in space applications. Furthermore, the expansion of a space-based power system presents additional concerns as new sources and loads may add additional power flows to the distribution system. Future high power space applications such as the Gateway or the lunar base are designed to expand over time to allow for additional components as base camp operations increase and capabilities develop. This presents new challenges in autonomy as the existing components may require updates to their protection settings when connecting new devices. Currently, power system protection is determined by teams of human operators using industry guidelines and rules-of-thumb. For deep space missions that have extremely high reliability requirements, such as missions to Mars, human control inputs can take on the order of minutes to hours to implement due to communication delays. Therefore, autonomous, and adaptive protection capabilities are an enabling factor for future space power systems.
This paper demonstrates a novel algorithm designed to set the circuit breaker trip times and current limits automatically based on the topology of the power system. When devices are added or removed from the system, resulting in changes to the power flow of the microgrid, the algorithm regenerates the protection system parameters and deploy them to the power system component controllers. Properly set protection parameters will isolate the fault at the circuit breakers closest to the source of the fault, thus allowing the maximum number of healthy components to continue functioning. The algorithm is verified against a high-fidelity real-time simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test platform.
This paper aims to demonstrate a novel algorithm to ensure coordinated (zonal) protection for space based microgrids. This will ensure that the maximum amount of functioning power system components are available after a fault occurs. This method can by applied to other power systems.
