Fuse Melting Curve Fitting and Implementation in a Time-Domain Simulation Environment

Over the last few years, intelligent protection schemes have been proposed for distribution networks to address the effects of distributed generation insertion. Nonetheless, most distribution protection systems still employ fuse links, whose operations are not affected by these methods. Since the actions of digital and analog protective devices must be coordinated, the intelligent equipment must account for the operation of fuse links. However, the fuse melting curves' equations are not known. Thus, alternative methods to determine their operation time must be adopted. In this paper, we propose using artificial neural networks to represent the melting curves of the 15 type T fuse links, as they can be used to fit nonlinear equations. Furthermore, we implement the resulting equations in the ATP-EMTP environment and provide the resulting simulation blocks, which can be integrated with more complex distribution protection systems.