Power Network Fault Location Based on Voltage Magnitude Measurements and Sparse Estimation

In this paper, an improved fault location method based on magnitude measurements of voltages and sparse estimation is proposed for power networks. Compared to existing sparse estimation based fault location methods, the proposed method not only retains the advantages of sparse estimation, but also avoids the complexity of PMU installation. In this paper, the influence of fault current on the bus voltages is equivalently represented by the bus injection currents at terminals of the faulted line. With only the voltage magnitude measurements, the FISTA algorithm is adjusted to match the characteristics of the sparse estimation problem and is applied to solve for fault location. Extensive numerical experiments with different fault types, impedances and locations prove that the proposed method can accurately determine the faulted line section with a large power network, and presents high fault location accuracy within the faulted line section using only voltage magnitude measurements at a limited number of buses.