A new approach to locate the voltage sag source using real current component

Abstract

Voltage sag can cause hours of downtime, substantial loss of product and also can attribute to malfunctions, instabilities and shorter lifetime of the load. Accurate voltage sag source location can help to minimize the loss and problems caused by voltage sag in a power distribution system. This paper proposes a new method to locate the source of voltage sag in a power distribution system. The proposed method uses the polarity of the real current component to determine the sag location relative to the monitoring point. The product of the RMS current and the power factor angle at the monitoring point is employed for the sag source location. A graph of this product against time is plotted. The voltage sag source location is determined by examining the polarity of the RMS current at the beginning of the sag. The proposed method has been verified by simulations and the results are proven to be in agreement when compared with the slope of system trajectory method.