Factors affecting traveling wave protection

This paper presents analysis of factors influencing traveling wave protection. Based on analysis of traveling wave transients, detection of the fault inceptions on transmission lines can be achieved. Influencing factors in this analysis consist of signal-to-noise ratio, frequency response of measuring equipments and nature of the faults. The related case studies for these individual factors were performed. The results indicate that the measured signals as inputs to relaying unit could contain undesired high frequency components due to low signal-to-noise ratio or even lose the desired high frequency traveling wave transients because of limited frequency response of measuring equipments. Furthermore the sufficient energy of traveling waves is influenced by nature of the fault which will also affect reliable fault detection.