Analysis of the effects of asymmetric faults in three-phase superconducting inductive fault current limiters

Inductive fault current limiters of magnetic shielding type can be described in terms of the excursion in the plane defined by flux linked with primary and line current, and this methodology has been previously applied to single-phase devices. Practical applications, however, require three-phase limiters, which, for the sake of compactness, may be built by three legged cores, instead of three single phase units. This has the advantage of using well established methods of power transformers industry, but the performance of the devices depends on the type of fault, e.g. phase to ground or phase to phase. For instance, in a three legged core, a phase to ground fault affects healthy phases, and these are the most frequent faults in distribution grids, where such systems are envisaged. The effects of asymmetric faults are analysed in this paper, by means of measured excursions in the linked flux-current plane.