Electrical Power and Energy Systems 53 (2013) 714718

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Electrical Power and Energy Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijepes

Transmission lines fault location using transient signal spectrum

Mehmet Salih Mamis , Mslm Arkan, Cemal Keles
Inonu University, Engineering Faculty, Electrical & Electronics Eng. Dept., Malatya, Turkey

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
This paper proposes a method for fault location on transmission lines, which is based on time to frequency domain transformation of transient signals of the fault instant measured at one end. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used for time to frequency domain transformation and frequency of the rst fault generated harmonic is utilised for determination of the fault location using the travelling wave theory of the transmission line. The accuracy of the method has been tested using the simulations carried out in Alternative Transients Program (ATP/EMTP) with frequency-dependent distributed parameter transmission line model by considering several cases and various types of faults, different values of fault resistance and phase angle at fault instant. The method has good accuracy and the simulation results show that the accuracy of the method is insensitive to the fault resistance and phase angle of the fault instant. Reactive elements may affect the resolution but, it can be removed by applying the correction procedure proposed. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 22 June 2012 Received in revised form 26 May 2013 Accepted 29 May 2013

Keywords: Transmission lines Fault location Travelling waves FFT

1. Introduction Power outages lead to loss of manpower and resources in industrial plants; on the other hand reliability and continuity of electrical energy has gained more importance in last decades due to enhanced competition and limited resources. The most important cause of disturbances in the power systems is unexpected failures, and within them, short circuit faults are more common, which are arisen due to lightning surges, usage of defective materials, improper system operation, human error, overloading and aging. Besides the economical losses in industry, a fault may cause loss of system stability, failure of transformers, generators and transmission lines and therefore, fast clearing of faults is greatly signicant. First condition for clearing a fault in a short time is to estimate the fault location quickly and precisely. This subject gained more importance in last decades and advance in the computer technology allows development of new algorithms for determination of fault location. In recent years several methods have been proposed for fault location in power systems, which may be classied into two categories; the methods which employ electric quantities and the methods based on the travelling wave theory. In some of the rst category methods, fault distance is estimated from the information received from one end of the transmission line [14], usually by using fundamental frequency voltages and currents measured at one terminal [1,2] or by measuring impedance from measuring

Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 422 3774816; fax: +90 422 3410046.
E-mail addresses: mehmet.mamis@inonu.edu.tr (M.S. Mamis ), muslum.arkan@ inonu.edu.tr (M. Arkan), cemal.keles@inonu.edu.tr (C. Keles ). 0142-0615/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2013.05.045

terminal to the fault point [3,4]. However, some of these methods require accurate modelling of both the faulted transmission line and the power system in which the line is embedded and some others cannot be used to locate symmetrical faults. In addition, for short lines, the equivalent impedance variation can have a higher inuence in method precision. Also unknown fault impedance affects the accuracy and some methods are sensitive to errors in the value of the local bus impedance. Due to these restrictions, two- or multi-ended fault location techniques have been proposed [58]. However, measurement from two ends is expensive and synchronised sampling of the voltage and current data from two ends of the line are usually required. In the travelling wave based methods [9,10] on the other hand, time-space analysis have been used for fault location. Short and open circuit faults on transmission lines cause sudden changes in the distribution of electric and magnetic energy which result travelling waves. In order to determine the fault distance, the analysis of wave time-position graphs are employed. In recent years, many studies have been devoted to develop different methods based on wavelet transform to determine the fault type and location [10,11]. Wavelet transform (WT) is a recently developed mathematical tool, which is used to capture the dynamic characteristics of unstable signals using short data windows. Depending on the direction in the protection of transmission lines, fault classication and fault distance identication using wavelet transform was carried out by separating the necessary information from the short circuit transient behaviour. The most important limitation of the existing methods based on the wavelet transformation is the low degree of accuracy in the prediction fault points near the busbar in general. In addition, there are other techniques, which use elements

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of articial intelligence in the form of articial neural networks (ANNs) [12,13] and support vector machine approach [14]. Using the theory of travelling waves, transient signal spectrum can also be used for determination of fault distance. This method has been applied for fault location estimation in single-phase transmission lines and satisfactory results have been obtained [15]. In this study, using modal transformations, the method is extended for three-phase transmission lines. Frequency spectrum which is obtained by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the transient signals measured on one terminal of the transmission line is used to detect the travel time of the fault generated wave, which makes available the fault distance. The proposed method is applied to the simulations carried out in Alternative Transients Program (ATP). A two-terminal three phase system with distributed and frequency dependent parameters is considered. The effects of phase angle, fault resistance and source parameters are also investigated. The organisation of the paper is as follows: After this introductory section, the theory of fault distance calculation using travelling wave theory of the distributed parameter transmission line is introduced in Section 2. In Section 3 the simulation model is given. In Section 4 application results are introduced; the effect of fault resistance, the affect of phase angle and the effect of source inductance is investigated. 2. Fault distance calculation using travelling waves Voltage and current phasors V and I at any point on the line with per unit length series impedance z = r + jxl and shunt admittance y = g + jxc are determined as [16]

f1

1 1 i ; f2 ; fi 2sf 2sf sf

Hence, if the wave speed and frequency of ith harmonic fi is known, the fault distance can be found from the following equation:

x v sf

iv 2f i

The frequency of the fault related harmonics of the voltage and current signals can be obtained by transforming transient signals into frequency domain. FFT is used for this purpose.

3. Simulation model In this study a 240 km 400 kV fully transposed three phase line shown in Fig. 1 is considered in the computer simulations to verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Tower conguration of the system is illustrated in Fig. 2 and physical parameters of the transmission line are given in Table 1. Marti frequency dependent transmission line model [17,18] is used in ATP simulations. ATPDraw le of the test system is illustrated in Fig. 3. Sequence current and voltage waveforms obtained by ATP simulation are transformed into frequency domain using FFT. As the positive sequence inductance of overhead lines is practically constant, wave speed is not affected from the frequency dependence of the line; hence the positive sequence voltage and current data are used. The voltage and current waveforms in time domain are transformed to modal quantities by using the following transformation:

V C 1 ecx C 2 ecx I 1 1 C 1 ecx C 2 ekx z0 z0

1 2

Im T1 Ip Vm T1 Vp

where r, l, g and c are resistance, inductance, conductance and capacitance of transmission line per unit p length, respectively; and p c zy is the propagation constant, z0 z=y is the characteristic impedance of the line. The constants C1 and C2 can be evaluated by using the boundary conditions at terminals of transmission line. Propagation constant of a transmission line can be written as c = a + jb, where attenuation constant a measured nepers per unit length and phase constant b radians per unit length. A wavelength k is the distance along a line between two points of a wave which differ in phase by 360, or 2p rad. If b is the phase shift in radians per km, the wavelength in km is

where subscript p and m denotes the phase and modal quantities, respectively. Modal transformation is not unique and for a transposed three-phase transmission line the following transformation matrix may be used:

6 T 41

7 1 5 and T1 1 1 1 0

2 3 1 1 1 16 7 4 2 1 1 5 3 1 2 1

10

2p k b
The velocity of propagation of a wave in km per second is

Positive sequence transmission line parameters at power frequency are used to calculate the wave speed from the following equations [19]:

v fk

lpos 107 ln

2dm hm GMReq Dm

H=m

11

where f is frequency in Hz and k is wavelength in km. The velocity of propagation in terms of line parameters can be simply obtained as

cpos

1  p lc

2pe0 dm hm ln 2 r eq Dm

F=m

12

5
where hm is geometric mean height, dm is geometric mean distance, Dm is geometric mean distance to images, req is equivalent radius of sub-conductor and GMReq equivalent geometric mean radius of conductor.

Let sf is travel time from fault point to measuring point which has theoretical value calculated as

sf

where x is the distance between the fault point to the measuring point. Each 2s generates a period and it has been observed from the simulation results that the frequencies of the voltage and current harmonics generated after the fault are proportional to the travel time as

Fig. 1. Two-terminal power network.

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Fig. 2. Tower conguration of 400-kV test systems.

Table 1 Data for 400 kV, 50 Hz, 240 km three-phase line. Phase arrangement Phase conductors Height at tower Height at midspan Phase spacing Number of bundle Radius of sub-conductor Spacing between sub-conductors Geometrical mean radius (GMR) DC resistance Ground wires Height at tower Height at midspan Spacing Radius DC resistance Horizontal tower conguration 24 m 12 m 12 m 2 1.521 cm 40 cm 1.2253 cm 0.0596 O/km 33 m 20 m 15.2 m 0.8 cm 0.3527 O/km

are: l = 1.075 mH/km and c = 10.805 nF/km and positive sequence p surge velocity calculated from these values is v  1= lc 3 293:42 10 km/s. Source resistance is assumed to be 0.1 O and source inductance is 1.0 mH. Transient current waveforms for one period in time domain (20 ms) are used for frequency spectrum. Time domain signals are sampled at 25.6 kHz with 512 numbers of samples. To reduce FFT leakage, prior to FFT, sampled voltage and current signals are windowed by using Hanning window. For 20 ms sampling time the FFT spectrum resolution is 50 Hz. This resolution may affect the accuracy of fault distance estimation especially at low frequencies. To increase FFT frequency resolution to 12.5 Hz, after windowing, 1536 zeros are appended to the windowed sampled signal. It has been observed from the simulation results that a resolution of 12.5 Hz is adequate for the proposed fault distance location technique. Other possible cause of error is truncation error in numerical calculations. In the voltage and current signals, source frequency is dominated. This makes it difcult to visualise the fault related frequencies. For the overhead transmission line considered, the lowest frequency of the rst fault related harmonic from (8), which is inversely proportional to the total line length, is approximately 611 Hz for a fault point at 240 km. This means that the frequency components between 0-to-611 Hz are not related to fault. Because of unavoidable of leakage effect in the spectrum instead of 0-to611 Hz after FFT, masking is applied to the spectrum for removing 0400 Hz components and after extracting the fundamental frequency, transient frequency associated with fault can easily be specied. Fig. 4 shows the sending end voltages and currents signals when three phase symmetrical fault occurs at 120 km at t = 0. To make the voltage transients more noticeable, the source inductance is taken to be 10 mH. Fig. 5 shows the power spectrum density of the positive sequence voltage and current signals for the same fault. As it can be seen from the gure, transient frequencies are clearly apparent and more than one transient frequency associated with the fault exist in both spectrums. The measured rst fault generated frequency in both spectrums is 1137.5 Hz, which corresponds to x = v/(2f1) = 293.42 103/(2 1137.5) = 128.97 km and the fault distance is calculated with 3.74 percentage error. This

Fig. 3. ATPDraw model of power system.

4. Applications and results Four types of faults; single line-to-ground fault (SLG), line-toline fault (LL), double line-to-ground fault (LLG) and symmetrical three-phase fault (LLL) are simulated in ATP by using frequency dependent overhead line model to obtain fault transients. Positive sequence parameters at 50 Hz calculated from Eqs. (11) and (12)

Fig. 4. Transient voltage and current waveforms for a balanced three-phase fault at 120 km from the sending-end.

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Table 3 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for LL, LLG and LLL for several fault locations. Actual fault distance (km) 40 80 120 160 200 Measured 1st harmonic frequency (Hz) 3612.5 1825.0 1225.0 912.5 737.5 Estimated fault distance (km) 40.61 80.39 119.76 160.78 198.93 Percentage error 0.25 0.16 0.10 0.32 0.45

Table 4 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for LLL at 120 km for different values of fault resistance. Fault resistance (O) 0.1 1 5 10 20 50 Estimated fault distance (km) 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 Percentage error 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10

Fig. 5. Spectrum of positive sequence transient voltage and current.

error is reduced to 0.12% by the correction algorithm described next. It can also be observed from the frequency spectrum that the other transient frequencies are multiple of the rst fault generated transient frequency, which can also be used to calculate the fault distance. The estimated fault distance by using the transient frequency of the current signal and total percentage error for LG is given in Table 2 and the estimated fault distance total percentage error for LL, LLG and LLL faults are given in Table 3, respectively. The percentage error is calculated as:

Table 5 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for LLL fault at 120 km for different phase angles. Phase angle in degree 0 30 60 90 120 150 Estimated fault distance (km) 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 119.76 Percentage error 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10

Error %

jActual fault distance Estimated fault distancej 100 Line length 13

As it can be seen from Table 2, for single line-to-ground fault error increases as fault point is far from the measuring point. The maximum error for LL, LLG and LLL is 0.45% which is reasonable. For the same fault distance, the error in the case of LG fault is greater than the error in other fault types, which is due to mutual effects. However, fault distance can be estimated more accurately by processing two end measurements, which is not required to be synchronised. For all fault types the total error covers the error associated with FFT and truncation error in the numerical calculations. Similar results are also obtained in the case when voltage signals are processed. However, when the source impedance is small, the transient voltage signals may not be noticeable, which may affect the accuracy. When compared with other methods that employ transient signals such as WT, estimations are more accurate especially for the fault very near to the substation ends. In [11], WT was used and

Table 2 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for LG fault for several fault locations. Actual fault distance (km) 40 80 120 160 200 Measured 1st harmonic frequency (Hz) 3675.0 1750.0 1162.5 862.5 700.0 Estimated fault distance (km) 39.92 83.83 126.20 170.10 209.58 Percentage error 0.03 1.60 2.58 4.21 3.99

the error for LLG and LL is high as 6.16%, which is 0.45% in the proposed technique for the same type of faults. Tables 4 and 5 show the effect of fault resistance and phase angle on the accuracy of fault distance for a fault at 120 km, respectively. As it can be seen from the tables, the fault resistance and phase angle do not affect the accuracy. Detailed analysis of current spectrums carried out in this work have shown that different values of the fault resistance and phase angles do not affect the fault generated harmonics frequency as well as the harmonics magnitude for all fault types. Although fault generated harmonics are clearly present for different phase angles, their magnitude may get smaller around zero crossing point, which makes difcult the detection process. One limitation of the method is that reactive elements such as source inductance may affect the accuracy. But this restriction can be overcome by distributing source inductance through the line. The effect of source inductance on the accuracy of fault location for a three phase fault is given in Table 6. As seen from the table error is very high. However, we have investigated that fault distance can be estimated with a reasonable error by modifying distributed line inductance by including the delay effects of the source inductance. The modication is as follows: First, the fault distance x is taken to be the total of line length in distributing the source inductance on the line and an approximate fault distance is estimated. Then, this estimated distance is used as new value of the fault distance and modied value of l is calculated. Our practical investigation shows that two step improvements are adequate for a reasonable error. The proposed improvement procedure is described by the following steps:

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Table 6 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for LLL fault at 120 km for different values of source inductance. Source inductance (mH) 0.1 1.0 10 50 Estimated fault distance (km) 119.76 119.76 128.97 156.49 Percentage error 0.10 0.10 3.74 15.20

insensitive to fault resistance and phase angle at fault instant. When compared with other travelling wave based methods, fault location can be estimated more accurately especially for the fault very near to the substation ends. It has been also shown that the negative effect of source inductance on the accuracy of fault location estimation can be almost eliminated by using the proposed correction algorithm. References

Table 7 Estimated fault distance and accuracy for a fault at 120 km for different values of source inductance after improvement. Source inductance (mH) 0.1 1.0 10 50 Estimated fault distance (km) 119.67 118.84 120.28 120.01 Percentage error 0.14 0.48 0.12 0.01

Step 1: Set i = 1 and xi = total line length. Step 2: Calculate line inductance li l 2xLis . p Step 3: Calculate propagation velocity v 1= li c. Step 4: Calculate corrected fault distance xi+1 = vsf. If i = N stop; otherwise xi = xi+1 and i = i + 1 goto step 2. where N is the maximum correction step, Ls is the source inductance (H). The accuracy on the locating fault distance for different values of the source inductance after applying the improvement algorithm is given in Table 7. Before improvement, the largest error is 15.20% which is reduced to 0.48% by the correction procedure. Using the improvement procedure, a similar enhancement is achieved for other types of faults. 5. Conclusion A travelling wave based fault detection technique for transmission lines is developed in this paper. Fault distance is estimated by considering the frequency of travelling wave with lower frequency which is obtained by processing transient current or voltage waveforms transformed into frequency domain using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Current data measured at one end are used. The method is applied to four types of faults in three-phase overhead line with frequency-dependent distributed parameter representation. The results show that the accuracy of the method is

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