A Novel Active Frequency Drift Method of Islanding Prevention for the grid-connected Photovoltaic Inverter

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel active frequency drift (AFD) method to improve the islanding detection performance with minimum current harmonics. To detect the islanding phenomenon of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) inverters concerning about the safety hazards and the damage to other electric equipments, the anti-islanding methods have been described. AFD using chopping fraction (cf) enables the islanding detection to drift up (or down) the frequency of the voltage during the islanding situation. However, the performance of the conventional AFD methods is inefficient and difficult to design the appropriate cf value analytically to meet the limit of harmonics. In this paper, the periodic chopping fraction based a novel AFD method is proposed. This proposed method shows the analytical design value of cf to meet the test procedure of IEEE Std. 929-2000 with the power quality and islanding detection time. To verify the validation of the proposed method, the islanding test results are presented. It is confirmed that the proposed method has not only less harmonic distortion but also good performance of islanding detection compare with the conventional AFD method