Detection of DC Series Arc Fault in SSPC Based on VMD and Shannon Entropy Criterion

Solid State Power Controller (SSPC) is the key component of advanced aircraft, vehicle and ship power distribution systems. The missed inspection and misdetection of arc fault detection (AFD) usually cause much difficulty for the arc recognition, especially in the case of inductive and capacitive loads. To analyze this problem, an arc fault experiment platform was built for DC SSPC of aircraft in this paper. Based on this experiment setup, the current data of the resistive, capacitive, and inductive loads is collected respectively under normal condition, arc fault condition, and switching transient condition. Then, the current data was processed by variational mode decomposition (VMD). Due to the different spectral characteristics of normal mode, arc fault mode and switching transient mode, the intrinsic mode function (IMF) under arc fault mode can be selected. Moreover, the transient frequency Shannon entropy was calculated, which can avoid the influence of random factors on the IMF components. Finally, according to the characteristic of determined IMF components, a new arc fault criterion was proposed for general DC arc detection. The experimental results verified that the proposed method can detect arc faults accurately and avoid misjudgment of switching transients effectively.