On compensating synchronization errors in two-terminal based fault location approaches

Two-terminal fault location methods have been increasingly used by utilities since they overcome limitations of single-ended approaches. Most two terminal fault location algorithms found in the literature require measurements to be synchronized, what has been reported as the main problem of these approaches. This paper demonstrates the application of a method able to correct synchronization errors in phasor-based fault location procedures that originally require the data to be synchronized. In order to illustrate its performance, a well known two-terminal fault location algorithm based on synchronized data is taken into account. Compared with other works, the method is simpler and does not require iterative processes. Fault simulations using the Alternative Transients Program (ATP) were carried out to analyze the algorithm performance. The obtained results show that traditional fault location methods based on two-terminal synchronized data may be used without a common time reference, provided that the synchronization error is properly compensated prior to the final fault location estimation.