Adaptive Single-End Fault Location Method

Abstract

The difficulty in using single-end traveling wave fault location is a necessity to identify the traveling wave reflected from fault among the background traveling waves, arriving at the locator installation after reflection from various electrical system discontinuities. In the known methods, the coincidence of the considered traveling wave front polarity with the first one is used as a criterion for selecting the traveling wave reflected from fault. The criterion is based on the assumption that the characteristic impedance of the electrical system adjacent to the protected power line is less than the characteristic impedance of the protected power line. In many cases, this assumption is justified, but there are examples of electrical systems in which this condition is not met. In such systems, the mentioned methods lose their performance due to incorrect criterion for selecting the traveling wave, reflected from the fault. This paper proposes an adaptive single-end traveling wave fault location method, based on taking into account the ratio of the characteristic impedance of the adjacent electrical system and characteristic impedance of the protected power line when identifying the traveling wave reflected from fault.