A travelling wave-based fault locator for radial distribution systems using decision trees to mitigate multiple estimations

Abstract

Electrical systems have been facing transformations, such as distributed generation insertion, system expansion and regulatory standards in order to increase reliability and quality of the power supply. Thus, fault location methods must be updated to ensure accuracy in estimating the location of electrical faults. The delay in restoring the system causes damage to utilities and consumers. Considering this, the current work presents an approach capable of locating faults accurately in radial distribution systems. At first, the distance is estimated using the travelling wave theory with data acquired from two terminals. Next, due to the radial characteristic of the system, the proposal aims to mitigate the problem of multiple estimation of faults. Thus, features are extracted from the voltage and current signals, which are used as inputs of decision trees to identify the fault region. The proposed approach was validated in a medium voltage distribution system, in which the results presented an average error of 0.79% (with a standard deviation of 0.4%) in estimating the fault distances and an average accuracy above 88.7% in identifying the region under fault. Thus, it was demonstrated that the proposed methodology is efficient to locate faults, mitigating the problem of multiple estimation.