WAM Assisted Robust Fault Location in Smart Grids: Resilience Amid Cascaded Failures

Abstract

This paper presents a robust transmission line fault location technique based on Wide-Area Measurements (WAMs). The ideal places for Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) in the transmission network enable the acquisition of time-synchronized voltage and current measurements. Because of the optimalplacement of the PMU locations, every bus is observable to at least two. The fault section is first located using measurements of PMUs positioned appropriately to apply the proposed algorithm properly. Once the faulty section is identified, the exact fault location is found using the voltage and current measurements obtained for both ends of the faulty transmission line. When cascaded faults occur on the multi-bus system, interconnected line faults prohibit data acquisition for the non-PMU bus. In this particular instance, the transmission line’s characteristics, impedance, and propagation constant are considered to offer a single-ended fault location approach with enhanced fault location accuracy. The IEEE 39-bus New England system is employed to test the approach. The ATP-EMTP modeling platform simulatesthe power system, and an algorithm is written in MATLAB. Additionally, the intended results of the provided algorithm have been verified through the Opal-RT-OP4510 real-time simulator.