Visually impaired recognition of a fully loaded high and medium voltages electrical network for layout formation and fault monitoring

Abstract

Faults in power systems are inevitable. These faults can cause undesirable outages that interrupt people's life, block factories’ production chain, and may even in worse case scenarios contribute to killing hospitalized patients. To minimize such catastrophes, many techniques were developed for the purpose of instantaneous monitoring and repairing of power systems. However, due to the increasing complexity of transmission line networks, enhancements to the fault location techniques became a necessity to align with the new challenges. This paper presents a technique designed to diagnose faults in a power network under test; it starts by a comparison between two commonly used Fault Location Algorithms: impedance and travelling wave-based methods. The latter have shown numerous advantages when compared to impedance-based methods that led us to the adoption of a travelling-wave variant Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR). TDR was incorporated with the graph theory and an optimization algorithm (Particle swarm optimization (PSO) in order to acquire the fault data rapidly, accurately, and with the least possible complexity.