Fault detection and classification in overhead transmission lines through comprehensive feature extraction using temporal convolution neural network

Faults in transmission lines cause instability of power system and result in degrading end users sophisticated equipment. Therefore, in case of fault and for the quick restoration of problematic phases, reliable and accurate fault detection and classification techniques are required to categorize the faults in a minimum time. In this work, 500 kV transmission line (Jamshoro‐New Karachi), Sindh, Pakistan has been modeled in MATLAB. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been used to extract features from the transient current signal for different faults in 500 kV transmission line under various parameters such as fault location, fault inception angle, ground resistance and fault resistance and time series data has been obtained for fault classification. Moreover, the temporal convolutional neural network (TCN) is used for fault classification in 500 kV transmission network due to its robust framework. From simulation results, it is found that faults in 500 kV transmission line are classified with 99.9% accuracy. Furthermore, the simulation results of the TCN model compared to bidirectional long short‐term memory (BiLSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and it has been found that TCN model is capable of classifying faults in 500 kV transmission line with high accuracy due to its ability to handle long receptive field size, less memory requirement and parallel processing due to dilated causal convolutions. Through this work, the meantime to repair of 500 kV transmission line can be reduced.