A Survey of Fault Location Techniques for Distribution Networks

Abstract

Since recent societies become more hooked into electricity, a higher level of power supply continuity is required from power systems. The expansion of those systems makes them liable to electrical faults and several failures are raised due to totally different causes. As a result of these failures, the faulty element ought to be disconnected and isolated as soon as possible to reduce the damage and remove the emergency state from the whole system. Power quality considerations impose the grid to spot the faulted area as rapidly as doable, which forces utility operators in speeding up fault detection and system recovery and subsequently decreasing blackout time and pertinent costs. All these conditions have raised incredible significances about investigating methods and techniques used for fast detecting of faulted area, thus this matter needs to be pulled in broad consideration among researchers in power systems. In this paper, a comparative environment classifies and surveys a wide number of fault location procedures for distribution networks. The paper can be considered as a guide for operating engineers and researchers to settle on the foremost viable plausibility backed their existing framework and necessities.

Comparative framework for AC-microgrid protection schemes: challenges, solutions, real applications, and future trends

“…Impedance or distance relays are widely employed to protect transmission networks and have recently been recommended to protect MGs, as they can detect and respond to both forward and backward faults. However, these relays face various challenges that can hinder their reliability, including issues with fault resistance, compensation factors during ground faults, and the effects of infeed currents [29,30]. In this context, DER infeed may obstruct the decision of impedance relays in MGs, as it causes the perceived impedance at the relay to be higher/lower than the actual impedance between the relay and the fault point, resulting in the relay either under-or over-reaching.…”

“…In such approaches, the currents and voltages of the protected line at one or both ends are recorded to compute the apparent impedance to the relay, as described in (2). This is then compared to the preset settings to detect the fault [10,30]. Distance relays have diverse characteristics and different patterns on the R/X diagram, such as impedance, resistance, mho, reactance, quadrilateral, and blinders.…”

“…In general, TWs-based detection schemes can either use the naturally generated signals at the fault location or those externally injected after fault inception to recognize fault events. Figure 20 demonstrates the traveling waves with different timings of reflection and refraction on the lattice diagram [30,114].…”