Practical testing of a fault location method based on sparse voltage measurement

This paper investigates the practical application of a fault location method based on sparse voltage measurements and proposes the use of additional information that is currently or potentially available to the utilities in order to make a refinement in fault location results. The additional information may be associated to consumer calls, lightning incidence, voltage and current magnitude measurement along the feeder. Additionally, a low computational effort allocation method is proposed to allocate the voltage meters. The complete methodology was developed to meet the requirements of a Brazilian utility which feeders may comprise more than two thousands of buses and may be longer than 50 km. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by case studies in a real distribution system.