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Transient-Based Fault-Location Method for Multiterminal Lines Employing S-Transform

Alireza Ahmadimanesh and S. Mohammad Shahrtash
AbstractIn this paper, a novel method for fault location in multiterminal transmission lines is presented. The method is based on applying the S-transform to the modal components of synchronized measured currents at different terminals to extract time of arrival of the rst arrived transient wave generated by the fault. These arrival times are then reported to a central processor where they are converted to distance indices and involved in a decision procedure. The simulation results have shown good performance of the proposed method under different fault resistances, fault inception angles, fault locations (even on tap points), fault types, and faulted sections. Index TermsFault location, multiterminal transmission line, S-transformation, transient based.

I. INTRODUCTION NE OF the main concerns of utilities upon fault occurrence is to nd fault location. Although this task is a postfault analysis, it is based on the measured voltage and/or current signals during fault existence. Different methods have been presented to provide this information which can be classied as impedance based, transient based, and articial-intelligence methods [1]. In another respect, these methods can be categorized according to the needed data-collection points, that is, whether data from all terminals (synchronized or nonsynchronized) are needed or local data are sufcient). But specically, fault location in multiterminal lines has been considered in a few published papers [2][8], which are all grouped in impedance-based methods. Regardless of the basis, a reliable fault-location method should provide acceptable accuracy under different fault types, fault resistances, fault inception angles, and fault locations. Moreover and specially, in transient-based fault-location methods there are two main concerns including: 1) fault inception angle of zero, where the transients have very low magnitudes; 2) close-in faults, where transients have very high frequencies.

Whenever this type of fault-location method is employed on more than two-terminal transmission lines, some other concerns also exist, including: fault on tap points, where transients spread away on different line sections just at their sources, fault on different line sections, where transients suffer from reections at tap points. In this paper, a new fault-location method for multiterminal transmission lines is proposed, which is based on processing the captured traveling waves initiated by faults, while a high sampling frequency is not required. The main tool in the proposed scheme is S-transform which is applied for the purpose of calculating reliable indices from appropriate modes of the currents in three phases, in order to provide the fault detection function and to be used as an indication for revealing the arrival time of the incoming waves toward the terminals of the transmission line. These results are then used for assigning the faulted section and estimating the fault location with acceptable accuracy. The proposed algorithm can deliver the fault location with negligible error under different conditions of fault location, faulted section, fault type, fault resistance, and fault inception angle. It is worth mentioning that the proposed algorithm needs synchronized current measurements at all terminals of the transmission line. The rest of this paper is constructed as follows. Section II introduces the S-transform and Section III describes the proposed method; rst for three-terminal lines and then for multiterminal lines. Section IV has shown the results of the proposed method in different simulated conditions. Finally, the conclusions are presented. II. S-TRANSFORM S-transform is similar to the short window Fourier transform except that a windowing function is applied which varies by frequency. By using this function, a better timefrequency transformation can be achieved. This transformation for discrete signals is dened by a matrix as

Manuscript received March 04, 2012; revised December 02, 2012; accepted February 10, 2013. Date of current version June 20, 2013. Paper no. TPWRD00222-2012. A. Ahmadimanesh was with the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Tehran 16844, Iran (e-mail: alireza_ahmadimanesh@elec.iust.ac.ir). S. M. Shahrtash is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Center of Excellence for Power System Automation and Operation, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran 16844, Iran (e-mail: shahrtash@iust.ac.ir). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRD.2013.2248068

(1) where signal, denotes the discrete Fourier transform of the original is the number of the samples in the data window, and

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Fig. 2. Three-terminal transmission-line conguration. Fig. 1. Rows of S-transform of a current signal at 99.5 kHz (top), 90 kHz (middle), and 57.5 kHz (bottom).

is the sampling interval. According to the aforementioned denition, this transformation provides a representation of 1-D time series into a 2-D timefrequency map of time-local spectral information [9], [10], where each of its rows represents the characteristics of the relevant frequency component of the original signal. For a better understanding of the performance of this transformation (in a transformation with a 200-kHz sampling rate and 50-Hz frequency steps), Fig. 1 has shown a few rows of this transform, applied to a fault current signal. As shown, the timefrequency location feature of the S-transform has made it a good tool for fault-location purposes. But the question is which row of the S-transform matrix should be selected for more accurate fault location. This question is answered in Section IV. III. PROPOSED METHOD The proposed algorithm for fault location is based on two stages, that is, fault detection and calculating the fault location. If the fault is detected in the rst stage, then the fault-location task is performed in the next stage. The bases of the proposed algorithm are rst described for three-terminal lines and then are improved for mutliterminal ones. A. Three-Terminal Lines Assume a transmission line with the conguration shown in Fig. 2. It is well known that after fault inception, waves begin to travel in all directions toward the terminals. Fault detection: The rst step in this stage is synchronized measurement of the current signals at all terminals. Then, modal transformations are applied to these current signals. For this purpose, Clarke transformation is used as (2) where (for phase-a as the reference) (3)

Similar transformations are made to nd for other phases as the references. Since the currents of phases that are involved in a fault have larger peaks, the modes with larger peaks and their associated phases are selected as the ones for further investigation. In the next step, S-transform is applied to the rst aerial mode of the selected phases in order to extract its high-frequency components. By inspecting the S-transform output magnitude (such as Fig. 1), the time instant corresponding to the rst peak is assigned as the time of arrival of the wave. (A further description is provided in the Appendix.) Applying this transformation to all terminals currents, upon the detection of these peaks at all terminals, the occurrence of a fault is reported, and the algorithm moves to the fault-location stage. Fault location: For better explanation of this stage, assume a fault has occurred at time in the RP section (as shown in Fig. 2). If the time instants corresponding to the wave arrivals at the three terminals are assigned , , and , respectively, the following relations can be written: (4a) (4b) (4c) is the wave velocity in the rst -mode (which can where be calculated, ofine, for the line under consideration [11]). By eliminating in the above equations, the fault location can be calculated by

(5) Each of these relations or their average can be used for estimating (i.e., the fault location on the RP section). It should be mentioned that there is a third relation, through combining (4b) and (4c), which results in the fact that as the fault is not located between the and terminals, the difference in time arrival of waves to these terminals is linearly related to the difference in the lengths of their corresponding sections, that is, . Using the notation as for the results of combining any two of the relations (4a)(c), while represents the reference

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Fig. 3. General conguration of a multiterminal transmission line.

terminal where the location is referred to and represents the terminal whose time of wave arrival is used in calculating the location index, then, the following indices can be introduced: (6a) (6b) (6c) and the faulted section and the fault location on it can be found by the following rules: If and , the fault is on RP. Then, or , or their average, gives accurate fault location. If and , the fault is on SP. Then, or , or their average, gives accurate fault location. If and , the fault is on TP. Then, or or their average gives accurate fault location. It is worth mentioning that whenever the fault is not located between two of the terminals, the corresponding location index will show the tap point in between; which will not make any problem for the proposed method. B. Multiterminal Lines Improving the proposed method for multiterminal lines, the fault detection stage is the same as that previously mentioned for three-terminal lines, that is, the outputs of S-transform at all terminals, when applied to rst aerial modes of currents, are inspected for peaks as an indication of fault occurrence. Then, to extend the solution for an -terminal line, suppose in such a line shown in Fig. 3 that the arrival times of waves are represented by (where ), and the fault-location indices are calculated, similar to (6), as follows: (7) The procedure is followed through checking ve criteria for each couple of faulted sections and . The criteria, based on the fault indices from (7), are examined through the following steps. a) Check , where if it is true then the fault location is at the right side of (in Fig. 3). Note that as the location procedure reaches this point (while it has

started from bus 1 and it has failed during the previous checks), it is obvious that the fault has not occurred on any of the sections at the right side of in Fig. 3. b) Check where if it is true then the faulted section is either or in Fig. 3. c) Check , where if it is true then the faulted section is . d) and e) Check and , where if they are true, then the faulted section is . Having found the faulted section, the fault location is simply found by an appropriate fault index from (7), that is: If the faulted section is , then stands for the fault distance from (i-1). If the faulted section is , then shows the fault distance from . It should be mentioned that in the case of fault on the tap points, such as , it can be found through inspecting the third aforementioned criteria. On the other hand, if becomes true, then the fault will be recognized as an external fault behind terminal ; while for more reliability, a binary signal as NOT of the output of the protection scheme against internal faults may also be involved in an AND operation with this criterion (not shown in Fig. 4). The complete procedure (at all terminals and the central processor) is shown in Fig. 4, where the part that should be executed by the central processor (after collecting data from all terminals) has been separated from the parts that should be followed at each terminal. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed fault-location algorithm, rst the network shown in Fig. 2 with the parameters of Table V has been simulated for different fault conditions. In these simulations, the frequency-dependent transmission-line model has been used. Various conditions have been simulated by ATP/EMTP software and MATLAB has been used for analyzing current signals and calculating fault-location estimations. In these simulations, the inuence of fault resistance, fault inception angle, fault type, and external faults have been investigated. The following subsection demonstrates the good performance of the proposed algorithm in three-terminal lines. In sequel, the proposed algorithm has been examined in multiterminal lines, under different fault types, fault inception angles, faulted sections, and fault locations. The results approve the good performance of the proposed algorithm for these lines as well. A. Three-Terminal Case Study The fault location, for a phase-a to ground fault at 30 km away from the terminal, has been estimated by employing different rows of the S-transform matrix (corresponding to different frequency components) and the results are shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that although the maximum error does not exceed 0.4%, there are some rows of S-transform which provide higher accuracies. To be ensured about the robustness

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Fig. 4. Flowchart of the proposed fault-location method for multiterminal.

of these results, by applying a preselected row of the S-transform matrix, the proposed procedure has been repeated for a specied fault but at various locations. Although the results,

presented in Fig. 6, have shown that estimating the fault location, by employing each of the 1650th and 1200th rows corresponding to 17.5-kHz and 40-kHz frequencies have shown

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TABLE I ESTIMATION ERROR (IN PERCENTAGE ) EMPLOYING DIFFERENT ROWS OF THE S-TRANSFORM MATRIX AND IN VARIOUS FAULT CONDITIONS OF THREE-TERMINAL LINE

TABLE II MAXIMUM ESTIMATION ERROR (IN PERCENTAGE) EMPLOYING DIFFERENT ROWS OF THE S-TRANSFORM MATRIX WITH DIFFERENT SAMPLING FREQUENCIES

Fig. 5. Estimation error for a phase-a-to-ground fault at 30 km from the terminal on the RP section employing different rows of an S-transform matrix.

Fig. 7. Estimation error for phase-a-to-ground fault at different locations of section TP in Fig. 2.

Fig. 6. Estimation error for a phase-a-to-ground fault at different locations on the RP section with an inception angle of 30 and a fault resistance of 1 , employing selected rows of the S-transform matrix.

the S-transform matrix with 200 kHz as the sampling frequency. Repeating the complete procedure with two other sampling frequencies (i.e., 100 and 76.92 kHz) and picking up the maximum estimation error in different conditions, the results are summarized in Table II. According to these results, the following remarks can be stated: a) Lowering the sampling frequency makes the estimation error increase. b) It seems that according to the sampling frequency, the most appropriate row of the S-transform matrix or frequency components to be employed in fault-location estimation can be found by the following relation:

similar and close to 0.1% errors in Fig. 5 (for the specied location), they may differ in errors for other locations (as shown in Fig. 6). Comprehensive investigations have been performed for different fault types occurring at different fault inception angles and at various locations with 1, 17, 50, and 100 as the fault resistance, while the maximum estimation errors have been picked up for each case. The maximum error for some of the cases have been represented in Table I, while employing different rows of

(8) To demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm in locating faults in different line sections, faults have been simulated at different positions on the TP section (in Fig. 2). Fig. 7 has shown the results by applying the best row of the S-transform matrix, where in all of them, the faulted section is correctly found and the fault-location algorithm performs as well as for the faults on other line sections.

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TABLE III ESTIMATION ERROR OF THE PROPOSED METHOD FOR DIFFERENT CONDITIONS IN MULTITERMINAL LINE

Fig. 8. Multiterminal transmission line.

B. Multiterminal Line Case Study Fig. 8 has shown a six-terminal transmission line [4]. Five of these terminals are connected to generators and one is connected to load. This network is 345 kV, whose parameters have been shown in Table VI. Following the owchart in Fig. 4, by employing the 1000th row of the S-transform matrix (as recommended in Table II), different fault conditions have been examined. Table III has shown the results, where the values of the fault-location indices in different conditions and the one used for nal estimation have also been entered. For example, for a fault that is 60 km away from in the 5-P4 section (tenth case in Table III), it is that has been selected by the proposed algorithm for fault-location estimation. Therefore, the estimated fault location is 59.56 from bus or 40.44 from bus 5. One of the important advantages of the proposed method is its ability to locate faults that have occurred close to the junctions and even on the tap points (i.e., points in Fig. 8). Cases 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, and 16 in Table III all have shown the results for such cases, where the faults are accurately located.

Moreover, the proposed method is immune to fault inception angle even if it has zero value. Cases 2 and 7 in Table III are faults of this type, located near the tap points, which are also accurately located. The performance of the proposed fault-location method for an external fault is also shown in Table III (case 18). In this case, external fault is located behind bus 6 on the line 67 in Fig. 8. As can be seen, none of the criteria corresponding to internal locations of the considered multiterminal line are fullled (as mentioned in Section III-B) and, thus, the proposed fault location responds correctly as an external fault. The effect of synchronization error on the accuracy of the proposed method has also been investigated. It is well known that GPS provides a very accurate synchronizing system with an error of less than 1 s. Thus, by using 200 kHz as the sampling frequency, the proposed method is not much affected by synchronization error and even if the maximum possible error is taken into account, there is only one sample error; thus, the fault-location error becomes only 0.738 km. Investigating the performance of the proposed method for different prefault power-ow conditions has also shown that there is no substantial change in the errors of the fault location and it remains under 0.47 km as the maximum error observed. Investigating the performance of the proposed method for the case where there is a lack of data has shown that if, in a rare case, the data from one of the terminals are not reported and, at the same time, a fault occurs on the corresponding line section, the proposed method will deliver the fault-location indices (from the arrival times reported by the other terminals) as if the fault is located at the tap point of that faulted section. In other words, in the case of missing data from one of the terminals and fault occurring on the corresponding line section, the proposed

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TABLE IV COMPARING THE PROPOSED METHOD WITH THE EXISTING METHODS

Fig. 9. Substituted part of the owchart in Fig. 4, in the case of missing data from one of the terminals (terminal 2, as an example).

method can indicate the faulted section but not the fault location on that line section. It should be noted that in the case of missing data from one terminal, none of the d-indices related to that data are calculated and/or referred to. Overall, whenever missing data are recognized, for example, from terminal 2 in Fig. 8, the corresponding part of the procedure in Fig. 4 is replaced with the one shown in Fig. 9, where corresponds to the maximum error of the proposed method which is not greater than 0.47 km. For faults on any other line section (other than the one with missing data from its corresponding terminal), there is no such disability. It is worth mentioning that the procedure (in Fig. 4) may be alternatively and/or simultaneously started based on the arrival time of any other terminal rather than terminal 1, in order to take advantage of a possibly quicker fault location as well as accomplishing its task in the case of missing data from terminal 1. V. COMPARATIVE RESULTS Although to the knowledge of authors there is no published methods for fault location in multiterminal lines based on travelling waves, and the published methods are all in the category of impedance-based methods, Table IV has been constructed to present a comparative analysis which shows the superiority of the proposed method although different test systems have been employed by each of them. The comparison is made on the amount of complexity of the test system, the extent of investigation, capability of nding the fault location on tap points and the accuracy; albeit according to the statements given in those papers. Moreover, some criteria have been examined to compare practical applications and implementation requirements. It can be seen that while some of the mentioned methods have some limitations in applications, all of them have not reported their performances against the faults on tap points which is one of the essential conditions that a fault-location method in multiterminal lines should show as reliable behavior. Moreover no case study about missing data has been proposed, except the one in [7] which has shown large output errors. Furthermore, most of these methods not only need to measure voltages together with

currents, but also their output reports contain 12 pieces of data (six phasors); whereas the proposed method in this paper needs only one piece of data from each terminal [i.e., the wave arrival time of the rst aerial mode of current (reported on the basis of a global clock)]. Nonetheless, the main concern about the proposed method is its need to have data acquisition (DAQ) with a sampling rate of 200 kHz; where much larger sampling rates are these days a common practice (e.g., 1.25 MHz as mentioned in [12]). Furthermore, it needs to employ broadband current transducers which are going to become common as well [13]. This comparison proves the superiority of the proposed method; albeit according to the aforementioned criteria and in a qualitative manner. VI. CONCLUSION This paper has presented a new fault-location method in multiterminal lines. A rule-based approach has been proposed that employs the time arrival of fault-generated transient waves, extracted synchronously at all terminals, by applying the S-transform. Based on a comprehensive study, the results have shown that the proposed fault-location method has very accurate performance in all fault conditions even on tap points and zero fault inception angles. Also, the results have shown the immunity of the proposed method to fault resistance, fault type, fault inception angle, faulted section, and fault location.

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REFERENCES
[1] M. M. Saha, J. Izykowski, and E. Rosolowski, Fault Location on Power Networks, First ed. New York: Springer, 2010, pp. 88. [2] S. M. Brahma, Fault location scheme for a multi-terminal transmission line using synchronized voltage measurements, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 20, no. 2, pt. 2, pp. 13251331, Apr. 2005. [3] K. G. Firouzjah and A. Sheikholeslami, A current independent method based on synchronized voltage measurement for fault location on transmission lines, Simul. Model. Practice Theory, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 692707, Apr. 2009. [4] C. W. Liu, K. P. Lien, C. S. Chen, and J. A. Jiang, A universal fault transmission lines, IEEE location technique for N-terminal Trans. Power Del., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 13731386, Jul. 2008. [5] S. M. Brahma, New fault-location method for a single multi-terminal transmission line using synchronized phasor measurements, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 11481153, Jul. 2006. [6] T. Nagasawa, M. Abe, N. Otsuzuki, T. Emura, Y. Jikihara, and M. Takeuchi, Development of a new fault location algorithm for multiterminal two parallel transmission lines, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 15161532, Jul. 1992. [7] T. Funabashi, H. Otoguro, Y. Mizuma, L. Dube, and A. Ametani, Digital fault location for parallel double-circuit multi-terminal transmission lines, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 531537, Apr. 2000. [8] B. R. K. Varma and P. V. R. Rao, A hybrid method for fault location in ehv multi-terminal circuits, presented at the 16th Nat. Power Syst. Conf., India, Dec. 2010. [9] R. G. Stockwell, L. Mansinha, and R. P. Lowe, Localization of the complex spectrum: the S transform, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 9981001, Apr. 1996. [10] C. R. Pinnegar and L. Mansinha, A method of time-time analysis: The TT-transform, Digital Signal Process., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 588603, Oct. 2003. [11] H. W. Dommel, EMTP Theory Book, 2nd ed. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Microtran Power System Analysis Corporation, 1992. [12] D. Spoor and J. G. Zhu, Improved single-ended traveling-wave faultlocation algorithm based on experience with conventional substation transducers, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 17141720, Jul. 2006. [13] IEEE Working Group, Practical aspects of Rogowski coil applications to relaying, IEEE Power Syst. Relay. Committee Special Rep., 2010. Alireza Ahmadimanesh was born in Tabriz, Iran, in 1986. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Tabriz University, Tabriz, in 2008 and the M.S. degree in power system protection from Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2011. Currently, he is with Azarbaijan Power Engineering Consultants Co. (Mona), Tabriz. His research interests include protection and electromagnetic transient analysis.

Fig. 10. Outputs of applying the S-transform to the aerial mode of current signals at different terminals of the multiterminal line in Fig. 8.

TABLE V PARAMETERS OF THE THREE-TERMINAL LINE IN FIG. 2

TABLE VI PARAMETERS OF THE MULTITERMINAL LINE IN FIG. 8

APPENDIX Generally in multiterminal lines (and in special cases of three-terminal ones), synchronized data acquisition in all terminals provides synchronized data windows. These data windows should have at least a length of in samples, where is the maximum length between the terminals, is the sampling frequency, and is as dened in (4). This value ascertains simultaneous capturing of the peaks in all terminals, if they exist. Finally, the arrival times of current waves can be found as shown in Fig. 10 (as an example, for a fault on in Fig. 8).

S. Mohammad Shahrtash was born in Tehran, Iran, 1960. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Abadan Institute of Technology, Abadan, Iran, in 1980, and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Manchester, U.K., in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1995. Since 1985, he has been a member of the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST). His main research areas are condition monitoring, protection, electromagnetic transient analysis, and power system studies.