Location of faulty section and faults in hybrid multi-terminal lines based on traveling wave methods

Abstract

Traveling-wave-based fault location methods are widely used for modern power systems owing to their high accuracy on two-terminal lines. However, they perform poorly on hybrid multi-terminal lines. Many traveling-wave-based methods have been developed recently to solve this problem, but they have high computational burdens and complex fault location procedures. To tackle this challenge, a new fault location method is presented in this paper. First, to ensure that the implementation of the proposed method is not affected by different line parameters, a normalization algorithm is used for hybrid multi-terminal lines, which consist of overhead lines and cables. To reduce the complexity, a novel fault section identification method that depends only on the first three arrival times is applied to separate a three-terminal fault section from the multi-terminal lines. Consequently, the fault can be located using a corresponding two-terminal fault location method in this fault section. To verify its effectiveness, fault case studies and performance evaluations are performed in the PSCAD and MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results reveal that the proposed method can correctly identify the fault section and accurately locate the faults, which is simple and suitable for hybrid multi-terminal lines.