Two-Terminal Traveling-Wave-Based Transmission-Line Protection

Abstract

This paper proposes a two-terminal traveling-wave-based transmission-line protection using only the first wavefront arrival time at each line terminal (polarity and magnitude of transients are not required), leading to a simple, accurate, and fast protection. In real time, the protection system detects internal and external faults and identifies the fault directionality. In addition, the protection zone and the protection operating time are also formulated. The effects of the sampling rate and the traveling-wave propagation velocity estimation are considered, and some paradigms, such as the need of a high-sampling frequency and an accurate traveling-wave propagation velocity estimation are properly addressed. Two traveling-wave-based protective relays were implemented and evaluated in realistic real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulations considering the communication equipment between the relays, in which reliability and protection operating time could be assessed accordingly.