Estimation of faults in DC electrical power system

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a novel optimization-based approach to estimating fault states in a DC power system. The model includes faults changing the circuit topology along with sensor faults. Our approach can be considered as a relaxation of the mixed estimation problem. We develop a linear model of the circuit and pose a convex problem for estimating the faults and other hidden states. A sparse fault vector solution is computed by using l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> regularization. The solution is computed reliably and efficiently, and gives accurate diagnostics on the faults. We demonstrate a real-time implementation of the approach for an instrumented electrical power system testbed at NASA. Accurate estimates of multiple faults are computed in milliseconds on a PC. The approach performs well despite unmodeled transients and other modeling uncertainties present in the system.