Title: Islanding detection in microgrids using multi-resolution morphological gradient

Authors: M.A. Aneesa Farhan

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India

Abstract: Owing to the extensive use of distributed generation, islanding detection is vital for the protection of the distribution system. In this paper, a novel and effective islanding detection scheme using a nonlinear signal processing technique named mathematical morphology (MM) is proposed. Here, a morphological filter called multi-resolution morphological gradient (MMG) is used to analyse the 3ɸ voltage and current signal. Accordingly, the output of the MMG filter is used to calculate the ratio of Euclidean distance (norm) also called the norm ratio of the voltage and current signal. In this work, the sum of changes in the norm ratio of the three phases is used as a tracking signal in order to detect islanding. Additionally, the paper also highlights a statistical technique for setting the threshold of the tracking signal. The performance of the developed technique is analysed extensively for different islanding events by varying power imbalances and non-islanding scenarios. The proposed method can detect the islanding even for a low value of power imbalances within two cycles as compared with the existing rate of change of frequency RoCoF method.

Keywords: islanding; Euclidean distance; nonlinear signal processing; multi-resolution morphological gradient; MMG.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPEC.2026.155139

International Journal of Power and Energy Conversion, 2026 Vol.17 No.3, pp.286 - 305

Received: 03 Aug 2023
Accepted: 27 Jan 2024
Published online: 28 Jul 2026 *

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