A Double-ended Contactless Current Traveling Waves Scheme for Fault Location in Overhead Transmission Lines

This study presents a contactless current traveling wave fault location scheme for a two-terminal overhead transmission line based on a tunnel Magnetoresistive sensor. The proposed method is implemented by installing a tunnel Magnetoresistive sensor array at both ends of the line for current traveling wave measurement. The measured data is transmitted to a remote monitoring unit (RMU) for analysis. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for different fault situations using an experimental set-up. The proposed exhibited high efficiency for current traveling wave fault location. The results were analyzed for fault location using the differentiator smoother to reduce the time of arrival errors. The proposed scheme is compared with a general traveling wave-based scheme for transmission line fault distance location. In all test cases, the proposed scheme offered very efficient results for all categories of faults with an average relative error of 0.024%.