Fault location using line impedance with the presence of ARC resistance

Abstract

Many methods were developed to identify the estimated location of faults in distribution systems. They are either dealing with the travelling waves generated by faults at high frequencies or using the fundamental frequency components. Among them "Fault Impedance Methods" are the most popular, but their accuracy is affected by the presence of fault resistances and the presence of arcs. In this project, PSCAD is used for simulating several types of faults, focusing in three lines to ground faults with different cases, including faults with and without fault resistance in addition to faults with arc. The fault impedance method code that improved to consider the presence of arcs and its resistance and implemented using MATLAB programming environment is used to estimate the fault location for the previous cases. As expected, the method is sensitive to the presence of fault resistance and fault arcs. However, the improved method achieved good results for faults with arcs at distances higher than 15 Ian and slightly improved results for shorter distances.