A combined impedance and traveling wave based fault location method for multi-terminal transmission lines

A new fault location method suitable for multi-terminal transmission lines that combines the advantages of both impedance and traveling wave based methods has been developed and presented in this paper. The proposed method first determines whether the fault is grounded or ungrounded by comparing the magnitude of the ground mode wavelet coefficients at the measurement end. Next, the impedance based method is used to identify the faulted half of the line in the case of two-terminal line and the faulted line section as well as the faulted half of the line section in the case of multi-terminal lines. Finally the fault location is determined by taking the time difference between the first two consecutive aerial modes of the current traveling waves observed at one end of the multi-terminal line. The proposed method has been tested on four- and five-terminal transmission lines with different types of faults, fault resistances and fault inception angles using ATP simulation.     

A state estimation approach for fault location in transmission lines considering data acquisition errors and non-synchronized records

The performance of algorithms for fault location is directly related to the accuracy of its input data. Thus, factors such as errors in the line parameters, failures in synchronization of oscillographic records and errors in measurements of voltage and current can significantly influence the accuracy of algorithms that use bad data to indicate the faults location. This paper presents a methodology for fault location based on the theory of state estimation in order to determine the location of faults more accurately by considering realistic systematic errors that may be present in measurements of voltage and current. The methodology developed is innovative because, besides calculating the most likely fault distance obtained from measurement errors, the variance associated with the distance found is also determined, using the errors theory. The obtained results are relevant to show that the proposed estimation approach works even adopting realistic variances. Moreover, the fault location brings performance gains compared to a traditional algorithm, available in the literature.