Fault Location in Transmission Lines in the Presence of Fault Current Limiter

Fault location is an interesting subject in power grids. On the other hand, the application of fault current limiter (FCL) has been increasing in power network and causes some problems in operation of protection systems. This paper studies the application of FCL in power system and its effect on one-ended simple reactance fault location methods. In these methods, only voltages and currents of transmission line sending-end terminal which equipped with measuring equipment are used to estimate the fault location. Presence of FCL in the time of fault occurrence makes the existing reactance methods inaccurate and causes malfunction of fault location devices. In this paper, a new method has been proposed to improve fault location in transmission lines equipped with FCL. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, various faults on different locations of transmission lines have been applied to the simulated power grid. This method implies an irritation process to calculate the remote terminal impedance and subsequently, fault current and location. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method have been proved through simulations.