Ground and phase fault classification for half-wavelength transmission lines relaying purposes

Abstract

In this work, a new fault classification and phase selection methodology for half-wavelength (HWL) transmission lines is developed. Initially, the basic principles of phase currents transformations are presented. Then, an innovative faulted phase selection methodology based on the variation of those currents is developed. The behavior of the electrical quantities related to short circuits in such long lines is very different when compared to conventional lines. The faulted phase selection method employed in this work is built on the fact that those decoupled currents are expected to not vary or vary less than the others, depending on how many phases are in short circuit. The robustness of the method was analyzed considering different load conditions and fault resistances. Furthermore, different sampling rates were considered for the phase currents. Extensive simulation studies showed that the developed method can accurately identify the fault types and the faulted phase with a relatively low sample rate. Moreover, the simulation results showed that the proposed method is not affected by the presence of inter-harmonics and responds precisely with high-resistance faults. The proposed algorithm presented errors smaller than 0.04%.