DC microgrids have attracted significant attention over the last decade in both academia and industry. DC microgrids have demonstrated superiority over AC microgrids with respect to reliability, efficiency, control simplicity, integration of renewable energy sources, and connection of dc loads. Despite these numerous advantages, designing and implementing an appropriate protection system for dc microgrids remains a significant challenge. The challenge stems from the rapid rise of dc fault current which must be extinguished in the absence of naturally occurring zero crossings, potentially leading to sustained arcs. In this paper, the challenges of DC microgrid protection are investigated from various aspects including, dc fault current characteristics, ground systems, fault detection methods, protective devices, and fault location methods. In each part, a comprehensive review has been carried out. Finally, future trends in the protection of DC microgrids are briefly discussed.

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In future, distributed energy resources (RESs) will be utilized at consumption points. As a consequence, power flow and fault current would be bidirectional and topologydependent; and hence the conventional protection strategies would be inefficient. This paper categorizes the main challenges in AC and DC microgrids, and then investigates the existing and promising solutions for the corresponding challenges. To the authors' knowledge, three parts of smart grids are required to be developed to facilitate implementation of protection scheme in microgrids. The main requirements and open issues of these three parts are discussed at the end of this paper.

This paper proposes a novel method to locate faults in an AC meshed microgrid. To this end, a set of features is first extracted and selected from the measured signals and fed to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect the occurrence of fault. Then, the Distributed Generator (DG) with the lowest amount of fundamental voltage, which is the closest one to the fault, injects an appropriate voltage/current harmonic. As the faulted section has the lowest impedance value from the PCC of the DG, the harmonic current of the corresponding line has the highest value. Based on this fact, the first candidate DG sends a notification signal to the second candidate DG, which the fault occurs between them. Finally, the impedances in the injected frequency are measured from these two DGs and fed into a multi-class SVM to locate the faulted line. The proposed method has the ability to locate faults for islanded and grid-connected microgrids with variable configurations. Real-time simulation results are taken by OPAL-RT to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the meshed microgrid.

Fault Current Limiters (FCLs) are one of the main solutions to upcoming challenges in microgrid protection. Regarding the high penetration of distributed generations (DGs) in future power system, designing cheap and effective FCL is a necessity. The present study addresses this issue by proposing an embedded FCL operating based on modifying the secondary control of four-wire DG. As this method is presented for a four-wire system, besides very low implementing cost, it has independency and flexibility to only limit the current of DG faulted phase. This study also provides real-time simulation results by OPAL-RT to compare the proposed method with a virtual-impedance-based FCL to validate its effectiveness. Finally, experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed FCL.