Analog Devices International Unlimited Company

Analog Devices Global Unlimited Company

Hans Brueggemann

Bijesh Poyil

John A Hayden

Gordon Cheung

Daniel Brian O'Malley

Ahmed Ali Mohamed

An arc detection method includes classifying whether an arc fault is present in the power system by, for each of a plurality of bins of a current frame of a signal, marking the bin as a candidate bin if a magnitude spectrum of the bin meets first criteria; determining a number of candidate bins in the current frame; marking the number of candidate bins as candidate cluster bins if the number of candidate bins exceeds a minimum cluster size; for each of the candidate cluster bins, determining whether the candidate cluster bin is also a candidate cluster bin of a previous frame of the first signal and if so, identifying the current frame as a candidate frame and incrementing a candidate frame count; and if the candidate frame count exceeds a candidate frame count threshold, determining that an arc fault is present in the power system.

DC arc detection and photovoltaic plant profiling system

Switching interference is a primary artifact which affects the accuracy of arc detectors. To address switching interference, conventional arc detectors employ computationally intensive techniques which are often designed specifically for a target application. Thus, conventional arc detectors require a significant amount of hardware to accurately detect arc faults, which can increase costs of the power systems and prohibit wide deployment of arc detectors. With improved signal processing, a unique method for arc detection can accurately detect arc faults efficiently while tolerate switching interference from an inverter of the power system. Specifically, the method provides accurate but efficient arc detection by using a small Fast Fourier Transform with coherent sampling that is accomplished with a common clock generator in combination with signal conditioning. The overall system implementing the method is also programmable to suit a variety of target applications.

Computationally efficient arc detector with coherent sampling

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Kelkheim, Germany

Hans Brueggemann