Broken Conductor Fault Location in Power Transmission Lines Using GMDH Function and Single-Terminal Data Independent of Line Parameters

The phenomenon of broken conductor faults (BCFs) in power transmission lines and, consequently, the suspension of the hot-line with no connection to ground, tower, or other conductive/non-conductive bodies is amongst special faults in terms of fault detection and location in the protection industry. Once such a failure occurs, the current of the faulty phase does not increase, which leads to the inability of standard fault detection functions in detecting the event. On the other hand, the variable nature of transmission line parameters due to weather conditions leads to misoperation and malfunction of fault detection and protection schemes of industrial relays in some cases. This paper, for the first time, presents a BCF location scheme without requiring line parameters data and only using magnitudes of current and voltage phasors of a single terminal based on Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH). In this method, a function is interpolated, the inputs of which are the current and voltage of the faulty phase, and its output are the accurate location of the fault. The function can be developed for all topologies of transmission lines. The proposed method is implemented in the MATLAB software and the obtained results verify the solidity and perfect performance of the method for different fault conditions.