A Performance Analysis of Methods for Fault Location in Transmission Lines Considering Errors in Data Acquisition

Algorithms for fault location are important tools in the operation of a power system because a reliable identification of faults is directly related with the supply availability. However, there are several factors that may influence the performance of a fault location process, such as inaccurate line parameters, failures in phasors extraction and synchronization, as well as intrinsic sampling errors inherent to voltage and current measurements. In this sense, the researches about data acquisition errors associated with fault location are scarce in the literature. This paper proposes to demonstrate the influence of bad measurements of voltage and current in the performance of two fault location methodologies, both based on voltage and current fundamental phasors. The measurement errors were considered as originated from instrument transformers inaccuracies, which are the sensors of data acquisition in Power Systems. Results of simulation show that corrupted measurements of voltage and current due to instrument transformers errors can significantly affect the accuracy of transmission lines fault location.