A Source-Independent Fault Detection Method for Transmission Lines

Abstract

This article proposes a source-independent method for detecting faults along Transmission Lines (TL) to reduce the protection issues arising from Inverter-Based Resources (IBRs). In the proposed method, high-frequency waves are sent from either end of a TL, and the amplitudes of the receiving waves at the other end are measured. Faults change the characteristics of TLs. Therefore, the amplitudes of the receiving waves differ when a fault occurs. Closed-form formulations are developed for describing the receiving waves before and during the faults. These formulations indicate that at least one of the receiving waves is reduced after fault inception. Therefore, faults can be detected by identifying a decrease in one of the receiving waves. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, EMTP-RV is utilized for performing simulations. Additionally, laboratory experiments are conducted for further evaluation of the proposed method. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to detect faults along TLs regardless of the sources supplying the grid.