A Wide Area Traveling Wave-based Fault Location Method in Power Transmission Grid

This paper proposes a new traveling wave-based fault location method for power transmission grids. The proposed method involves an online and an offline stage. In the offline stage, the transmission network is represented by a weighted graph. The shortest paths between any two sensors are determined. The branches of the graph that are not on at least one of the shortest path, are divided into virtual lines associated with the location of the sensors. In the online stage, according to first arrival time at different sensors, the points belonging to the shortest paths obtained during the offline stage with the possibility of having a fault are identified Then using an evaluation index, the exact point of fault and the fault inception time are determined. The proposed method is independent of the fault type and can be utilized in transmission network with any size. Simulation studies carried out using EMTP software and MATLAB, verify high accuracy of the proposed method.