A general fault location method in complex power grid based on wide-area traveling wave data acquisition

• A general fault location method in complex power grid based on of wide-area traveling-wave data acquisition is presented.
• The proposed method shows advantages over traditional approaches in solving blind zone, when fault is occurred close to monitoring point.
• Based on integration of wide-area traveling-wave data acquisition and grid topology relationship, the proposed method has high accuracy and robustness.

With the development of wide-area measurement technology, it is possible to obtain the fault-originated traveling wave synchronously in a complex power grid. Based on the specialized deployment of the monitoring points and arrival time of initial traveling wave-front acquired by phase-mode transformation and wavelet transformation, this paper proposes a general method for fault-location in complex power grid. Manhattan distance is adopted to find out the accurate measuring combinations, by which the preliminary fault location is calculated. Then the accuracy and robustness of the results can be improved by the fault-occurrence time which is calculated by the information of monitoring points and grid topology relationship. All simulations are carried out in PSCAD and the IEEE 30-bus system is built in order to obtain the synchronization fault signals. The simulation result proves that the proposed method has high accuracy. The uncertainty of the measurement errors is also included in the simulation and shows that the algorithm has high robustness.