Fault Current Phasor Estimation Below One Cycle Using Fourier Analysis of Decaying DC Component

Abstract

The full-cycle discrete Fourier transform (FCDFT) is commonly used to estimate phasors in numerical relays because of its immunity to harmonics and accurate identification of a decaying dc component (DDC) in a fault current. For fast protection of power systems, it is necessary to speed up the phasor estimation by using a data window below one cycle. The conventional least squares (LS) methods below one cycle approximate the DDC as the first several terms of the Taylor series expansion, which degrades the phasor-estimation accuracy. This paper proposes an LS method that uses Fourier analysis for approximation of the DDC to speed up phasor estimation without accuracy degradation. The phasor-estimation accuracy of the proposed method is investigated for the data-window length in simulations using synthetic data of fault currents containing DDC, harmonics, and measurement noise. The phasor-estimation speed is also investigated with respect to the delay of the antialiasing filter in the numerical relay. The proposed method is compared with the conventional LS and FCDFT methods in simulations using synthetic fault-current data. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated through the phasor estimation of simulated transmission-line faults.