Abstract
In the last few decades, the Smart Grid paradigm presence has increased within power systems. These new kinds of networks demand new Operations and Planning approaches, following improvements in the quality of service. In this sense, the role of the Distribution Management System, through its Outage Management System, is essential to guarantee the network reliability. This system is responsible for minimizing the consequences arising from a fault event (or network failure). Obviously, knowing where the fault appears is critical for a good reaction of this system. Therefore, several fault location techniques have been proposed. However, most of them provide individual results, associated with specific testbeds, which make the comparison between them difficult. Due to this, a review of fault location methods has been done in this paper, analyzing them for their use on underground distribution lines. Specifically, this study is focused on an impedance-based method because their requirements are in line with the typical instrumentation deployed in distribution networks. This work is completed with an exhaustive analysis of these methods over a PSCADTM X4 implementation of the standard IEEE Node Test Feeder, which truly allows us to consistently compare the results of these location methods and to determine the advantages and drawbacks of each of them.
Highlights
The energy needs and quality requirements of our society have been increasing in the last few decades
Once the model and its simulation set have been defined, and the resulting information from its execution over PSCADTM has been generated, the step is to analyze the results of applying the six methods selected for this study on it
It allows us to identify when a method offers a valid fault position estimation. This validation criteria considers the limitation of methods (e.g., Reactive Component is only applicable to simple fault) and rejects incoherent results when they are outside of the section (d < 0 or d > 1)
Summary
The energy needs and quality requirements of our society have been increasing in the last few decades These improvements follow the lead of the new Smart Grid (SG) tendencies [1,2,3,4]. Storage (DES) [8] presence, which together with Demand-Side Management (DSM) [9,10] systems make up microgrids [11] and provide improvements in the network reliability [12]. This presence shifts the traditional philosophy of Transmission and Distribution (T&D) systems, adding bidirectional energy flows along them. As will be seen below, these changes in the flow directions are a significant constraint on network fault analysis, requiring complex systems to guarantee a proper operation in these environments
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