High impedance fault modeling and location for transmission line✰

Abstract

A fault in a power system generates economic losses, security problems, social problems and can even take human lives. Therefore, it is necessary to have an efficient fault location strategy to reduce the exposure time and recurrence of the fault. This paper presents an impedance-based method to estimate the fault location in transmission lines. The mathematical formulation considers the distributed parameters transmission line model for the estimation of the fault distance, and it is obtained by the application of Gauss-Newton method. Said method considers available voltage and current measurements at both terminals of the transmission line as well as the line parameters. Moreover, the method can be used for locating high and low impedance faults. Additionally, it is proposed an adjustable HIF model to validate its performance, which allows to generate synthetic high impedance faults by setting specific features of a HIF from simple input parameters. The error in fault location accuracy is under 0.1% for more than 90% of the performance test cases. The easy implementation of this method and encouraging test results indicate its potential for real-life applications.