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Computer-Aided Power System Fault Analysis

Article  in  Computer Applications in Engineering Education · March 2011

DOI: 10.1002/cae.20290

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Computer-Aided Power
System Fault Analysis
SAMI EKICI
Firat University, Department of Electrical Education, 23119 Elazig, Turkey

Received 26 May 2008; accepted 5 October 2008

ABSTRACT: Most of power systems courses contain mathematical analysis, animations,

simulations, and technical tours to power stations. However, experimental studies particularly
in fault analysis are very difficult due to high voltages and currents passed through short
circuits. Although there are experimental equipments and prototype systems for the students,
they are very expensive. This paper presents a new computer-aided approach for power system
analysis course at The University of Firat. The new course covers the previous course which
contains only a short experiment by using a prototype power system. The sequence of
new updated course for high-voltage fault analysis is following: experimental implementa-
tions, simulation, signal processing and fault classification. A questionnaire containing 11
questions has been applied to students to determine the effectiveness of the new course.
According to questionnaire; the updated course has been found more useful to analyze and
understand the transmission line faults than the previous course. ß 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Comput Appl Eng Educ; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/
cae.20290

Keywords: power systems; fault analysis; signal processing

INTRODUCTION conventional way of providing practical experience

Power engineering education is again the topic of
great interest ever since the process of deregulating
the power industry has been initiated [1]. Electric
power systems have experienced dramatic changes
in the last twenty years [2]. Much work has been
previously done in the area of developing useful
visualization techniques to aid in interpreting power
system [3].
Electric power systems laboratories have always
been virtual because cannot be performed practical
experiences on a HV transmission system. The
Correspondence to S. Ekici (sekici@firat.edu.tr).
ß 2009 Wiley Periodicals Inc.
to students is through the use of extensive laboratory-
based systems. Such systems require an actual
hardware setup and a set of laboratory measurement
systems that sometimes are costly to build and
difficult to maintain. For safety and security reasons,
access to the laboratory-based system is usually
limited to a certain time and can only be given in
the presence of a local facilitator [4].
In the past, Transient Network Analyzers (TNAs)
were the only simulation tools available for research
and education in electric power engineering. How-
ever, the advent of digital analysis has led to a more
convenient way of performing simulations through
digital computers. The success of computer-based
simulation for power system analysis, since electricity

1
2 EKICI
is invisible, is reproducing real phenomena through
computer-based simulations as an efficient solution
for didactic and research purposes [5]. The power
system academic community has made admirable
efforts to provide to students and researchers simu-
lation tools that cover different aspects of electric
power system analysis. Some examples of these
software packages are Alternative Transient Program
(ATP) and MATLAB for windows [6]. ATP is the
royalty-free version of EMTP (The Electromagnetic
Transients Program). ATP is probably the most
widely-used Power System Transients simulation
program in the world today [7]. With this digital
program, complex networks and control systems
of arbitrary structure can be simulated. ATP has
extensive modeling capabilities and additional impor-
tant features besides the computation of transients [8].
A comprehensive list of power system software tools
is available in Reference [9].
This paper describes a new computer-aided
course which is suitable for students of signal
processing and electrical power system analysis and
simulation. The course consists of three stages. In the
first stage, power system equipments are introduced
and a simple application is performed on a prototype
power transmission line model. The sample applica-
tion is performed under low-voltage for security of
students and equipments. In the second stage, the
transmission line faults are simulated by ATP which is
very conformable for modeling and analyzing of
electric power system events. The users of ATP can
simulate a lot of power system events easily. They can
also save the outputs of the simulation obtained
from ATP as ‘‘pl4’’ file which can be converted to
MATLAB ‘‘mat’’ files. In the third stage, students
determine the fault types by using the faulty signal
data sets which are obtained from the simulation. This
stage includes feature extraction and classification
process by using novel techniques such as Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN) and Wavelet Transform
(WT) on the contrary to conventional courses which
do not include fault identification. A questionnaire
which contains 11 questions has been applied to
students in order to have an opinion about the
effectiveness of updated course. The outputs of the
questionnaire have been analyzed by SPSS for
Windows, version 9.0 [10].
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
One of the important experiments included in power
system laboratory is short circuit faults on trans-
mission lines. This experiment is implemented in 7th
semester of the electrical education department of the
Firat University. During a short circuit or ground
fault, extremely large currents pass through the
circuit. Therefore, fault duration must be very short
to not cause serious damages to the experimental
equipments. One the other hand, the fault occurrence
and the post fault current and voltage values cannot be
measured and observed accurately if the fault duration
is very short. A prototype power system is used in the
fault analysis course. The prototype system used in
the experiment is shown in Figure 1. An isolation
amplifier is used to decrease the measured voltage and
currents. A three-phase 380 kVAC power source, 380/
220 kV transformer, 360-km transmission line and
measuring equipments are included in the experiment.
It is true that no-loss line cannot realized in
practice, nevertheless the simplifications are more
applicable, and the higher voltage levels to be
considered. In the laboratory experiment performed
in this study, a low-loss transmission line is simulated.
The actual line on which this simulation is based has a
length of 360 km overhead transmission line on
braced mast, cross-section 4  240/40 mm2 Al/St.
The system parameters are chosen with 1:1000 scale
factors. Line resistance, line inductance, mutual
capacitance, earth resistance and earth capacitance
are 13 O, 290 mH, 1 mF, 5 O and 2 mF respectively. For
all fault types (single-line to ground, double-phase,
double-phase to ground and three-phase symmetrical
faults), the faulty voltage and current signals are saved
by data acquisition card to be analyzed. Figure 2
denotes a three-phase symmetrical fault current curve
obtained from receiving end of the prototype power
transmission line.
As shown in Figure 2, the three-phase currents
decrease symmetrically since the most of current
passes through the short circuit. Due to the fact that
we study in the lower current and voltage values, the
Figure 1 Prototype power system.
 COMPUTER-AIDED POWER SYSTEM FAULT ANALYSIS 3

Figure 3 ATP simulation of the power transmission line.

Figure 2 Current curves of a symmetrical fault measured at
receiving end of the line. [Color figure can be viewed in the
online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.]
[Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is
available at www.interscience.wiley.com.]
FAULT TYPE IDENTIFICATION

obtained signals have high frequency noise compo-
nents. Because of the fault resistance, the load current
is not equal to zero at the fault point completely. The
changes in the current and voltage signals of single-
line to ground, double-line and double-line to ground
faults are asymmetrical. Thus, these faults are
categorized and named as asymmetrical faults.
After the experimental study and simulation, the
students use WT and ANN which are the most popular
two techniques to classify transmission line faults
recently. Data sets obtained from ATP are used for
classification task. The identification of fault types
consists of two stages. The first stage is feature
extraction and the second is classification.

Feature Extraction
TRANSMISSION LINE SIMULATION
Wavelet Transform (WT) is employed for the feature
The students could not observe the fault situations extraction stage. WT is a mathematical technique used
enough in the experimental study because of deficient for many application of signal processing [11,12].
fault duration and dangerous fault currents. Therefore, Wavelet is much more powerful than conventional
the transmission line faults are simulated by ATP methods in processing the stochastic signals because
program to investigate fault situations exhaustively. of analyzing the waveform time-scale region. In
The simulation time is 0.5 ms with 20 ms time step and wavelet transform, the band of analysis can be
the simulation parameters are selected as real values. adjusted so that low frequency and high frequency
A 380 kV and 360 km long transmission line which is
simulated by using ATP is shown Figure 3.
All fault types (single-line to ground, double-line,
double-line to ground and three-phase symmetrical)
are simulated for different fault location. Fault voltage
and current signals which belong to different faults
occurred at different locate of the line are saved as
‘‘pl4’’ file that will be converted ‘‘mat’’ file to be used
in MATLAB applications.
The value of terminal voltage, line impedance,
fault resistance and load are changed to be inves-
tigated their influences on the fault occurrence. This
gives detailed information about the transmission line
faults. In Figure 4, the fault voltage curves of three-
phase symmetrical fault occurred at sending end of the Figure 4 Voltage curves of a symmetrical fault measured
line is shown. at sending end of the line.
4 EKICI
components can be windowing by different scale
factor. Recently WT is widely used in signal
processing applications, such as de-noising, filtering,
and image compression [13,14].
It is necessary to extract the characteristic
properties of the faulty signals in order to perform
the fault classification accurately. By this way, not
only the more distinctive properties of the signals will
be determined but also the number of data will be
reduced. The feature extraction is carried out with
Wavelet Toolbox in MATLAB computer program.
Before the feature extraction stage, different
faults occurred at different locations on the power
transmission line have been simulated by ATP. The
simulation runs 0.5 s and 25,000 data are obtained for
each faulty phase. It is impossible to use such a big
amount of data in the classification task. One cycle of
Figure 5 Three-level wavelet decomposition. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue,
which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.]
the signal which contains the half cycle of the pre-
fault and post-fault is considered for the data
reduction. Therefore 1000 samples are obtained for
each faulty voltage or current signal. Then, WT has
been employed for obtaining high frequency detail
components which give distinctive features about the
curves. Daubechies-4 (db4) was selected as a mother
wavelet [15]. One approximation and three details
coefficients have been obtained with three-level
decomposition for each curve. The first feature which
has the highest energy value belongs to the approxi-
mation and hence is ignored. Thus, three features
are chosen for only one faulty current or voltage
waveform. Therefore, total six distinctive features
which belong to one terminal current and voltage
signals have been obtained for each fault state. In
Figure 5 wavelet coefficients are shown for three-level
 COMPUTER-AIDED POWER SYSTEM FAULT ANALYSIS 5

decomposition of current signal which belongs to
SLG fault at 10th km. In the Figure 5, the first curve is
the original signal which contains the half period
of pre-fault and half period of post-fault signal.
The second curve is approximation coefficients. The
other three-curve in the Figure 5 are detail coefficients
for the three-level decomposition. As can be shown
from the figure, the approximation coefficients have
not any distinctive feature. However, three-detail
coefficients have the high frequency components at
the fault points. These features will be used for
classification task.
Classification
In the second stage, Artificial Neural Network (ANN)
is employed for the classification of faults. This stage
is more useful for the postgraduate students but it is
also explained for the graduate students shortly.
Artificial neural network is widely used in the
engineering areas such as telecommunication, medi-
cine, control and power systems [16]. ANN is made
up of many computational processing elements called
neurons or nodes [17,18]. These nodes operate in
parallel and are connected together in topologies that
are loosely modeled after biological neural systems
[14]. The training of ANN is carried out to associate
correct output responses to particular input pattern.
Once trained properly, an ANN has the ability to
generalize when similar, but not identical patterns are
introduced to the network [15]. The determination of
the fault types by using ANN is performed after the
distinctive properties of each signal are extracted. The
Neural Network Toolbox in MATLAB is utilized for
classification. A group of the properties of faulty
signals is used for training and the rest of them are
used for testing of ANN. The distinctive features
obtained from WT are used as the inputs of ANN. The
outputs of the ANN are fault types or fault locations.
The detailed information about the fault determina-
tion and location can be found in [19].
OBTAINED RESULTS
FROM QUESTIONNAIRE
Participants were asked to fill out an 11-item
questionnaire marking a choice ‘‘yes’’, ‘‘no’’ or
‘‘ambivalent’’. A total of 56 students participated in
questionnaire. The obtained results from question-
naire are depicts in Table 1. The items of question-
naire are given below. In this course:
1. I have just found opportunity to intensify my
theoretical knowledge.
2. Visuality is in the foreground.
3. I can observe all fault conditions which are
occurred on transmission lines.
4. Course passes enjoyably.
5. I can understand better real fault cases.
6. I can participate into the course effectively.
7. I can obtain enough knowledge about power
system equipments.
8. Working safety comes first in the experiments.
9. I think that the intelligent techniques such
as ANN are suitable in order to identify fault
type.
10. I will be able to use knowledge obtained from
this course to different courses such as
electrical machinery, control systems, etc.
11. It is easy to use and apply the computer
programs which included in this course.
According to Table 1, it is shown that majority of
the students participated the course claim that the new
course is very effective as regards above aspects.
However, the students are ambivalent in 7th and 11th
items.

Table 1 Obtained Results of Questionnaire

Number of Standard
Items participants Minimum Maximum Mean deviation

1 56 1.00 3.00 1.2500 0.51346

2 56 1.00 2.00 1.1429 0.35309
3 56 1.00 1.00 1.0000 0.00000
4 56 1.00 2.00 1.2857 0.45584
5 56 1.00 1.00 1.0000 0.00000
6 56 1.00 1.00 1.0000 0.00000
7 56 1.00 3.00 1.7500 0.74468
8 56 1.00 1.00 1.0000 0.00000
9 56 1.00 2.00 1.2500 0.43693
10 56 1.00 2.00 1.2857 0.45584
11 56 1.00 3.00 1.8929 0.82415
6 EKICI
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this study a computer aided teaching method for
power transmission line faults is presented. Firstly
students applied the experiment in laboratory on a
prototype power system, and then they simulated the
transmission line faults in ATP in order to intensify
the subject and finally determined the fault types
by using wavelet transform and artificial neural
networks. This method gives way to develop the
experimental skills of students and their knowledge of
transmission line faults in virtual environment. A
questionnaire was asked to fill out from the students
who attend the new course and some opinions of the
students about the new course are given below: The
new course provides:
@ visual teaching,
@ safe experimental environment,
@ opportunity to observe fault events detailed,
@ facility to transfer the theoretical knowl-
edge into practice,
@ virtual laboratory to exercise on trans-
mission line faults.
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 COMPUTER-AIDED POWER SYSTEM FAULT ANALYSIS 7

BIOGRAPHY

S. Ekici received the BS degree from the

Department of Electrical Education, Firat
University, Elazig, Turkey, in 2000 and the
MSc degree from Institute of Science and
Technology, Firat University, in 2003. He is
currently a doctorate student and research
assistant in Firat University. His research
interests include artificial intelligence in
electrical power systems and boundary
element method.

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