Ground fault location on a transmission line using high frequency transient voltages

Abstract

This thesis addresses two different problems in the location of ground faults on transmission lines. The first problem is related to the reflected waves which arise for near faults to the busses. The second problem is utilizing wavelet in some special studies that required the manual measurement for determining the time difference between two consecutives signals of initial waves. Novel method is presented by using traveling wave approach with no exploiting of reflected waves to overcome the aforementioned difficulties. A simple effective approach to accurately and rapidly obtain the ground fault location along a transmission line during fault transients is presented. The objective of the presented method is to eliminate the need to use the reflected in ground fault measurement especially for a case of one-end measurement where there is no synchronization required for initial signals at both sides. This is accomplished by developing a new automatic technique for the time measurement to determine the time difference between the initial waves of ground and aerial mode voltages. Proposed approach is implemented in different environments such as electromagnetic Transients Program ATP/EMTP and MATLAB. High voltage transmission system will be modeled and different ground faults will be generated at different locations in the entire length of the transmission line. Further, a study of different factors that may have a remarkable effect to the accuracy is obtained such as the fault resistance and fault type. Simulation results and further statistical analysis show high correlation between the actual and estimated fault locations for all the studied cases. An extended comparative study between former method of fault location and the proposed method is obtained for better understanding and pinpointing the difficulties concerning the accuracy and rapid fault computations. The proposed approach has added a main advantage of requiring high frequency transient fault signals only from one-end of the transmission line without exploiting the reflected waves generated from the fault point. Furthermore, its insensitivity to naturally occurring close in infeed reflected waves which results significant errors in fault location measurement. Such waves are overlapped with initial wave cause a difficulty to identify the time difference.

Date of Award	Dec 2011
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Redy Mardiana (Supervisor)