Development of a Bidirectional HVDC Circuit Breaker Combining a Thyristor Full-Bridge Circuit and Coupled Inductor

Hybrid circuit breakers (HCBs) play a vital role in developing multi-terminal HVDC (MT-HVDC) systems, owing to their favorable features of fast fault current isolation and low on-state losses. In HCBs, the way of commutation of the fault current and the configuration of the main breaker branch have a significant impact on the performance of interruption. This paper proposes a new bidirectional HCB based on a coupled inductor that realizes robust interruption capability. In the proposed topology, a bridge-type breaker branch is utilized to realize the bidirectional breaking. By using insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) in combination with coupled-inductor-based circuit in the main breaker branch, the short-circuit fault is isolated. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed HVDC circuit breaker, simulations are performed using Matlab/Simulink.