Evaluation of the efficacy of transient overvoltages suppression measures in different wind farm topologies using SF6 circuit breaker

Various overvoltage mitigation schemes were used in literature in suppression of switching overvoltages in wind farms. However, the evaluation of how the effectiveness of these mitigation techniques would vary with the change of the wind farm topology is still un-explored territory. The main aim of this paper is to study the effectiveness of four mitigation schemes while using SF6 circuit breaker namely; R–L smart choke, R–C snubber circuit, surge capacitor and pre-insertion resistor (PIR) were studied in four different wind farm topologies; radial, single-sided ring, double-sided ring and star topologies. The topologies were based on a real wind farm located in Zaafrana, Egypt. The results showed that R–L choke to be the most effective scheme for all topologies followed by PIR, R–C snubber and surge capacitor schemes respectively. Their percentage of reduction of overvoltage ranged from 62 to 84% for R–L choke, 33–67% for PIR, 8–25% for R–C snubber circuits and 4–15% for surge capacitors. Also, it was shown that the change of the wind farm topology didn’t affect the order of effectiveness of the mitigation schemes such that R–L remained the most effective and surge capacitor the least effective for all topologies.