LAUSR

Microgrids (MGs) suffer from unpredictable faults on the feeders for various random reasons. These faults could obstruct the stability of the MG operation and damage the components. Moreover, many uncertainties elements affect the MG’s response to faults, such as faults’ types and locations and resistances, MG operation modes, DG penetration levels, load variations, and system topologies. Therefore, fault detection, classification, and location are vital for the MGs as they provide rapid restoration and protect the components. This paper proposes an adaptive protection (AP) scheme for the future renewable electric energy delivery and management (FREEDM) system. The proposed scheme is based on the convolution neural network (CNN), in which the measured current and voltage at buses are processed in multidimensional arrays for the images’ identification and classification. The gorilla troops optimization (GTO) technique has been used to improve the CNN by acquiring the optimal architecture and hyperparameters of the proposed CNN. The proposed protection scheme can detect the system fault, classify the fault type, and determine the fault location using three proposed CNN-GTO protection scheme models. A communication channel has been performed to transfer the data, information, and tripping signals between the different devices in the FREEDM system. The proposed method is tested using a hypothetical FREEDM microgrid system under different fault conditions. The results show that the proposed CNN-GTO models can detect, classify, and location feeder faults in the FREEDM system with high accuracy. A comparison with the existing schemes such as Support vector machine, Fuzzy logic, conventional CNN, and wavelet-based CNN is performed. The optimized CNN-based GTO models can achieve an overall accuracy for fault detection, classification, and location of 99.37, 99, and 98.2%, respectively.