An Online Travelling Wave Fault Location Method for Unearthed-Operated High-Voltage Overhead Line Grids

Abstract

In this paper, a single-ended travelling wave-based fault location algorithm is presented with reference to HV (i.e., 60 kV) overhead unearthed operated lines. The main novelty of this contribution lies in the method of calculating the speed of the earth mode component of the travelling wave, which exploits the earth mode impedance and capacitance, and of simplifying the fault location procedure. The developed procedure has been applied to a real double-circuit overhead line modeled by EMTP-rv, whereas the fault location algorithm has been implemented in a MATLAB environment. In order to validate the proposed method, a sensitivity analysis has been performed by varying the fault position, the fault resistance and the fault inception angle. The proposed approach has proven to be independent of all these parameters.