A Practical Integrated Fault Location Method for Electrical Power Distribution Networks

Future distribution systems are expected to be self-healing systems which can manage the faults and quickly restore the customers from outage. As the basic function of fault management systems, fault location methods play an important role in reducing the outage time and related costs. This paper aims to present a practical method that provides precise and reliable estimations of the fault location. The method is an integration of a voltage sag-based method and an impedance-based method. Following to any permanent fault, the proposed method first uses the voltage sag magnitudes measured by a limited number of meters to find the closest node to the fault. Then, it investigates the lines connected to the node selected and uses an impedance-based method to find the exact fault location. The method proposed can be applied to large-scale distribution systems having several laterals and load taps. Simulations are on a practical distribution system are performed to test the method performance. The simulation study includes a comparative analysis with two other recent methods reported in the literature. The results show the better accuracy of the proposed method even with measurement inaccuracies and load data errors.