An analytical approach to locate evolving faults on transmission lines based on sparse wide area measurements

This paper presents a fault location algorithm which can accurately locate evolving faults on transmission lines. Evolving faults are types of faults such that the faulted phases change over time. Although locating commonly occurring shunt faults have been widely studied, there is a need for reseach on estimating locations of evolving faults. Locating evolving faults is quite challenging due to rapid fault type transition after fault inception. This paper proposes an analytical method to locate evolving faults on transmission lines. The proposed algorithm is based on sparse wide area measurements which may be taken far away from the faulted line. The method is applicable to both single- and double-circuit lines, which can be either transposed or untransposed. Distributed parameter line model is adopted to consider long line effects accurately. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a 27-bus transmission system developed in Electromagnetic Transient Program (EMTP) and promising results are achieved.