A Novel Method to Detect High Impedance Faults Using Time and Frequency Domains Characteristics

The detection of the high impedance fault (HIF) is a challenging task for power system engineers and, although there is an extensive number of publications on this topic, the HIF still has various characteristics to be exploited and means to make its distinction over the other system's occurrences. This paper presents a novel method for detecting HIF using characteristics in the time and frequency domains. The proposed method searches the buildup and shoulder stages using the positive peaks of the current signal to then analyze the third harmonic to detect the HIF. The test system used represents a radial power distribution feeder which was simulated in ATPDraw and the implementation of the method was made in Matlab®. The results shown that the proposed technique has great robustness detecting all HIF cases without operational errors for another transient events.