Abstract: In a bipolar DC distribution system, a monopolar grounding fault often results in cascade failures on the healthy pole. To improve the reliability of bipolar DC distribution, the concept of monopolar fault reconfiguration is proposed for a bipolar DC system. The dynamic model of a monopolar fault in a bipolar DC system is established and the impact of three factors on the mechanism of monopolar fault reconfiguration is analyzed. The three influencing factors are the grounding type of inter-pole capacitance, the power deficiency of the non-fault pole, and protection delay of the voltage balancer. Based on the mechanism analysis of overvoltage generation on the non-fault pole, the optimized configuration scheme for the inter-pole capacitance grounded through the neutral point is proposed in this paper. To reduce the impact of non-fault pole power shortage and voltage balancer protection delay, this paper proposes the non-fault pole load shedding scheme and the voltage balancer locking scheme based on the transient change of fault current. Simulation and experimental results verify that the monopolar fault reconfiguration scheme proposed in this paper can effectively improve the power supply reliability and the power quality for the critical load in a bipolar DC distribution system.