Real-time assessment of a symmetrical component and microcontroller based distance relay

This paper presents the design, implementation and real-time assessment of a microcontroller based digital distance relay that can be used for the protection of power transmission lines. The proposed design is implemented using a general-purpose Intel 8097 microcontroller and custom-made filters, operational amplifiers, sample-and-hold amplifiers, multiplexers, and analog-to-digital converters. The relay software is based on a computationally efficient symmetrical component based fault distance estimation algorithm. Results of the performance assessment studies on this algorithm have shown promising fault distance estimates for first-zone faults on the protected transmission line. Real-time implementation of the symmetrical component based fault distance estimation algorithm is presented and discussed in this paper. Hardware and software tools were used to design and fabricate a microcontroller based distance relay using the above-mentioned algorithm. This paper describes details of the design of the distance relay. A test setup in the laboratory using a transmission line model was used to generate data to assess the real-time response of the designed relay. High-speed relay operation of the order of one cycle is demonstrated in the test results.