Faults Location in Transmission Lines using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients

Transmission lines (TL) are one of the most important components of an electrical system and, due to their extension, they are the most vulnerable to faults. Fast and accurate fault location on transmission lines is necessary to reduce repair costs, maintain system reliability and cause the least damage to customers. In this context, this work proposes the implementation of a method for locating faults in TL using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) for processing voltage and/or current signals that will be analyzed by a genetic algorithm to extract the best parameters to be used in a curve fitting algorithm to determine the fault location. A general relative mean error of 7.05% was found. The highest relative errors were found near the measurement terminal. Since the largest errors are concentrated near the terminals, the method proved to be reliable.