A voltage-based fault location method for radial distribution networks

A conventional method to locate a fault in a radial network consists in placing current detectors along each feeder. The measured currents indicate if the fault is above or below each sensor. The fault section can then be determined, manually or automatically, depending on the communication devices associated, or not, with the current detectors. This method is efficient, at least for phase-to-earth or phase-to-phase faults, but it requires a significant number of sensors and it does not make it possible to detect "open-circuit" faults (broken cable). The method proposed in this paper is not based on current measures, but on voltages measures located in MV/LV stations. This method may be particularly interesting if LV potential transformers are already available. The method is divided into two steps. The first one consists of determining whether each sensor is above or below the fault. The second one consists in determining the fault section, from a purely topological method.