Research on Optimal Placement of Travelling Wave Fault Locators in Power Grid

Taking the full network observability of power system operation state, maximum state measurement redundancy and minimum number of travelling wave fault location device (TFD) as objectives, an TFD optimal placement scheme for power grid fault location with travelling wave is presented in the paper. The scheme contains two steps: static processing and dynamic configuration. Terminal substations should install TFD. Then taking the terminal substations as starting point, the whole network is separated into several unattached branches. The branch which includes the most number of substations, via the longest line, and has not any loop, can install TFD at its both terminals. And then combining with the practical length of each line and coverage range of substations, the optimal disposition of TFD can successfully accomplish. A novel network-based fault location algorithm is also designed with travelling wave velocity on-line measuring and every TFD recorded travelling arrival times fusing. EMTP simulation results show that the TFD optimal placement scheme can use less TFDs to locate all faults in the whole power grid with economy and high reliability. The location error is no more than 100 m.