Faulty section location method for high impedance grounding fault in resonant grounding system based on discrete Fréchet distance

When a High Impedance Fault (HIF) occurs in a resonant grounding system, the differentiation of the current flowing upstream and downstream of the fault point is inconspicuous due to the weak electrical signal. This paper proposes a faulty section location approach based on Discrete Fréchet Distance (DFD) to address this issue. Initially, taking the zero-sequence current as the characteristic quantity, the instantaneous value of the zero-sequence current at each sampling point and its previous sampling moments are accumulated to amplify the fault signal, and furthermore to obtain the cumulative waveform of the zero-sequence current at each monitoring point. The DFD values between the cumulative waveforms of zero-sequence currents flowing through each section are also calculated. For a branchless section, if the Coefficient of Variation (CV) of the DFD in each section does not exceed the threshold value, it is identified as an end-of-line fault, otherwise, the section with the maximum DFD is identified as a faulty section. For a section with branches, the branching coefficient is calculated to determine whether it is a faulty section or not. Finally, MATLAB/Simulink simulation results and field-recorded data demonstrate the validity and robustness of the approach under various fault conditions, despite the connection of Distributed Generators (DGs).