A Novel Fault Location Method for More Electric Aircraft Distribution System

Despite all the advantages that More Electric Aircrafts (MEA) provide to conventional aircrafts, increasing the electric power demand and the operating voltage in these aircraft, has led to expanding the aircraft distribution system, increasing the cable used, and subsequently, increasing the probability of fault. In this type of aircrafts, due to the limitations in the structure and available space on the aircraft, cables are often located outside the sight and aircraft gaps. Therefore, in this paper, in order to increase aircraft safety and reduce the maintenance time, a novel fault location method is proposed, which determines the fault occurrence and exact location of all faults. For this purpose, in this paper, first by using the wavelet analysis of fault currents, the fault occurrence and the zone of fault is determined. Then, using positive sequence of distributed cable model as well as unsynchronized voltage and current of the both terminals of the fault zone, the exact location of fault using a two-step algorithm combining the PSO and the Newton method is obtained. The proposed method is implemented in an aircraft distribution system using MATLAB/SIMULINK, and the simulation results confirm the accuracy and high precision of the proposed method.