Transient fault area location and fault classification for distribution systems based on wavelet transform and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS)

A novel method to locate the zone of transient faults and to classify the fault type in Power Distribution Systems using wavelet transforms and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) has been developed. It draws on advanced techniques of signal processing based on wavelet transforms, using data sampled from the main feeder current to extract important characteristics and dynamic features of the fault signal. In this method, algorithms designed for fault detection and classification based on features extracted from wavelet transforms were implemented. One of four different algorithms based on ANFIS, according to the type of fault, was then used to locate the fault zone. Studies and simulations in an EMTP-RV environment for the 25kV power distribution system of Canada were carried out by considering ten types of faults with different fault inception, fault resistance and fault locations. The simulation results showed high accuracy in classifying the type of fault and determining the fault area, so that the maximum observed error was less than 2%

FAULT LOCATION ALGORITHMS, OBSERVABILITY AND OPTIMALITY FOR POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Power outages usually lead to customer complaints and revenue losses. Consequently, fast and accurate fault location on electric lines is needed so that repair work can be carried out as fast as possible. Chapter 2 describes novel fault location algorithms for radial and non-radial ungrounded power distribution systems. For both types of systems, fault location approaches using line to neutral or line to line measurements are presented. It’s assumed that network structure and parameters are known, so that during-fault bus impedance matrix of the system can be derived. Functions of bus impedance matrix and available measurements at substation are formulated, from which the unknown fault location can be estimated. Evaluation studies on fault location accuracy and robustness of fault location methods to load variations and measurement errors has been performed. Most existing fault location methods rely on measurements obtained from meters installed in power systems. To get the most from a limited number of meters available, optimal meter placement methods are needed. Chapter 3 presents a novel optimal meter placement algorithm to keep the system observable in terms of fault location determination. The observability of a fault location in power systems is defined first. Then, fault location observability analysis of the whole system is performed to determine the least number of meters needed and their best locations to achieve fault location observability. Case studies on fault location observability with limited meters are presented. Optimal meter deployment results based on the studied system with equal and varying monitoring cost for meters are displayed. To enhance fault location accuracy, an optimal fault location estimator for power distribution systems with distributed generation (DG) is described in Chapter 4. Voltages and currents at locations with power generation are adopted to give the best estimation of variables including measurements, fault location and fault resistances. Chi-square test is employed to detect and identify bad measurement. Evaluation studies are carried out to validate the effectiveness of optimal fault location estimator. A set of measurements with one bad measurement is utilized to test if a bad data can be identified successfully by the presented method

Fault Location in Grid Connected Ungrounded PV Systems Using Wavelets

Solar photovoltaic (PV) power has become one of the major sources of renewable energy worldwide. This thesis develops a wavelet-based fault location method for ungrounded PV farms based on pattern recognition of the high frequency transients due to switching frequencies in the system and which does not need any separate devices for fault location. The solar PV farm used for the simulation studies consists of a large number of PV modules connected to grid-connected inverters through ungrounded DC cables. Manufacturers report that about 1% of installed PV panels fail annually. Detecting phase to ground faults in ungrounded underground DC cables is also difficult and time consuming. Therefore, identifying ground faults is a significant problem in ungrounded PV systems because such earth faults do not provide sufficient fault currents for their detection and location during system operation. If such ground faults are not cleared quickly, a subsequent ground fault on the healthy phase will create a complete short-circuit in the system, which will cause a fire hazard and arc-flashing. Locating such faults with commonly used fault locators requires costly external high frequency signal generators, transducers, relays, and communication devices as well as generally longer lead times to find the fault. This thesis work proposes a novel fault location scheme that overcomes the shortcomings of the currently available methods. In this research, high frequency noise patterns are used to identify the fault location in an ungrounded PV farm. This high frequency noise is generated due to the switching transients of converters combined with parasitic capacitance of PV panels and cables. The pattern recognition approach, using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) multi-resolution analysis (MRA) and artificial neural networks (ANN), is utilized to investigate the proposed method for ungrounded grid integrated PV systems. Detailed time domain electromagnetic simulations of PV systems are done in a real-time environment and the results are analyzed to verify the performance of the fault locator. The fault locator uses a wavelet transform-based digital signal processing technique, which uses the high frequency patterns of the mid-point voltage signal of the converters to analyze the ground fault location. The Daubechies 10 (db10) wavelet and scale 11 are chosen as the appropriate mother wavelet function and decomposition level according to the characteristics of the noise waveform to give the proposed method better performance. In this study, norm values of the measured waveform at different frequency bands give unique features at different fault locations and are used as the feature vectors for pattern recognition. Then, the three-layer feed-forward ANN classifier, which can automatically classify the fault locations according to the extracted features, is investigated. The neural network is trained with the Levenberg-Marquardt back-propagation learning algorithm. The proposed fault locating scheme is tested and verified for different types of faults, such as ground and line-line faults at PV modules and cables of the ungrounded PV system. These faults are simulated in a real-time environment with a digital simulator and the data is then analyzed with wavelets in MATLAB. The test results show that the proposed method achieves 99.177% and 97.851% of fault location accuracy for different faults in DC cables and PV modules, respectively. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the designed fault locator in real field applications is tested under varying fault impedance, power outputs, temperature, PV parasitic elements, and switching frequencies of the converters. The results demonstrate the proposed approach has very accurate and robust performance even with noisy measurements and changes in operating conditions

Program latihan industri di Kolej Universiti Teknologi Tun Hussein Onn : kajian terhadap perlaksanaan sistem penilaian

Kajian yang dijalankan adalah bertajuk "Program Lalilian lndustri Di Kolej Universiti Teknologi Tun Hussein Onn : Kajian Terhadap Perlaksanaan Sistem Penilaian". Sampel terdin daripada 6 orang pakar serta 63 orang pelajar yang terlibat dalam latihan industri. Maklumat yang diperolehi berdasarkan kaedah kualitatif dan kuantitatif Data dianalisis untuk meninjau kaedah penilaian yang dijalankan dan seterusnya memastikan apakali sistem penilaian yang perlu diperbaiki. Secara keseluruhannya, kebanyakan responden berpendapat bahawa sistem penilaian yang sedia ada adalah perlu diperbaki dan disistematikkan selaras dengan ISO 9000 : 2001. Berdasarkan daripada keputusan yang diperolehi dan bimbingnan pakar dari Unit Latihan lndustri KUiTTHO, maka satu "Buku Panduan Penilaian Latihan lndustri" dihasilkan dengan panduan yang ringkas dan lampiran borang-borang yang telah diperbaiki dan diubahsuai. Diharapkan produk mi dapat digunakan untuk masa-masa akan datang

Wavelet Based Analysis for Transmission Line Fault Location

This paper presents wavelet based analysis for transmission line fault location. Faults in power transmission lines cause transients that travel at a speed close to the speed of light and propagate along the line as traveling waves (TWs). Traveling wave theory is utilized in capturing the travel time of the transients along the monitored lines between the fault point and the protective relay. This will help in proposing an accurate fault location technique based on high frequency components of fault current. Time resolution for these components is provided by the wavelet transform. This approach has the advantages of being independent of the fault impedance and fault inception angle. The application of the proposed technique for typical faults is illustrated using transient simulations obtained by MATLAB Simulink program. Keywords: travelling waves, wavelet transform, fault location, MATLAB Simulink

Fault Location in High Voltage Shunt Capacitor Banks

High Voltage Shunt Capacitor Banks (HV-SCBs) are critical substation assets that are primarily used to improve power factor and thus power transmission capability. Over temperature, over voltages, manufacturing defects can cause internal failures of capacitor elements. With today’s sensitive protection available in numerical relays these failures will be detected and SCBs will be taken out of service. But determining the phase and section in which capacitor elements have failed is important for utilities to decrease downtime of SCBs. This thesis proposes methods to address the challenges in fault location of SCBs. The proposed methods apply calibrating factors that compensate for pre-existing inherent unbalances, and system voltage unbalances. They can mitigate the gradual capacitance change due to temperature effects or natural aging. The presented fault location methods are further enhanced to detect the number of failed elements. The proposed methods can be integrated into common unbalance protection of the multi-functional numerical SCB relays and put forth solutions to condition monitoring of SCBs. Advance maintenance alarms for fuse saving in externally-fused SCBs, and reducing the search space for the faulty cans with fuseless or internally-fused designs are the significant outcomes of the proposed methods. The proposed methods are simulated in a relay modeled in MATLAB and the voltages/currents are played back from COMTRADE records of PSCAD electromagnetics transient simulations. Detecting consecutive failures, ambiguous failures, and delivering the number of failed elements for each alarm in fault reports are valuable to the utility community and have been verified for the proposed methods

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThree major catastrophic failures in photovoltaic (PV) arrays are ground-faults, line-to-line faults, and arc faults. Although the number of such failures is few, recent fire events on April 5, 2009, in Bakersfield, California, and April 16, 2011, in Mount Holly, North Carolina suggest the need for improvements in present fault detection and mitigation techniques, as well as amendments to existing codes and standards to avoid such accidents. A fault prediction and detection technique for PV arrays based on spread spectrum time domain reflectometry (SSTDR) has been proposed and was successfully implemented. Unlike other conventional techniques, SSTDR does not depend on the amplitude of the fault-current. Therefore, SSTDR can be used in the absence of solar irradiation as well. However, wide variation in impedance throughout different materials and interconnections makes fault locating more challenging than prediction/detection of faults. Another application of SSTDR in PV systems is the measurement of characteristic impedance of power components for condition monitoring purposes. Any characteristic variations in one component will simultaneously alter the operating conditions of other components in a closed-loop system, resulting in a shift in overall reliability profile. This interdependence makes the reliability of a converter a complex function of time and operating conditions. Details of this failure mode, mechanism, and effect analysis (FMMEA) have been developed. By knowing the present state of health and the remaining useful life (RUL) of a power converter, it is possible to reduce the maintenance cost for expensive high-power converters by facilitating a reliability centered maintenance (RCM) scheme. This research is a step forward toward power converter reliability analysis since the cumulative effect of multiple degraded components has been considered here for the first time in order to estimate reliability of a power converter

New selective earth faults only current directional method for isolated neutral systems

In order to achieve total selectivity at electrical distribution networks it is of great importance to analyze the defect currents at ungrounded power systems. This information will help to grant selectivity at electrical distribution networks ensuring that only the defect line or feeder is removed from service. In the present work a new selective and directional protection method for ungrounded power systems is evaluated. The new method measures only defect currents to detect earth faults and works with a directional criterion to determine the line under faulty conditions. The main contribution of this new technique is that it can detect earth faults in outgoing lines at any type of substation avoiding the possible mismatch of traditional directional earth fault relays. This detection technique is based on the comparison of the direction of a reference current to the direction of all earth fault capacitive currents at all the feeders connected to the same bus bars. This new method has been validated through computer simulations. The results for the different cases studied are remarkable, proving total validity and usefulness of the new method

Analysis of Fault location methods on transmission lines

Analysis of different types of fault is an important and complex task in a power system. Accurate fault analysis requires models that determine fault distances in a transmission line. The mathematical models accurately capture behavior of different types of faults and location in a timely manner, and prevents damaging power system from fault energy. The purpose of this thesis is to use two methods for determining fault locations and their distance to the reference end buses connected by the faulted transmission line. The two methods used in this investigation are referred to as impedance-based and traveling wave methods. To analyze both methods, various types of faults were modeled and simulated at various locations on a two-bus transmission system using EMTP program. Application and usefulness of each method is identified and presented in the thesis. It is found that Impedance-based methods are easier and more widely used than traveling-wave methods

System configuration, fault detection, location, isolation and restoration: a review on LVDC Microgrid protections

Low voltage direct current (LVDC) distribution has gained the significant interest of research due to the advancements in power conversion technologies. However, the use of converters has given rise to several technical issues regarding their protections and controls of such devices under faulty conditions. Post-fault behaviour of converter-fed LVDC system involves both active converter control and passive circuit transient of similar time scale, which makes the protection for LVDC distribution significantly different and more challenging than low voltage AC. These protection and operational issues have handicapped the practical applications of DC distribution. This paper presents state-of-the-art protection schemes developed for DC Microgrids. With a close look at practical limitations such as the dependency on modelling accuracy, requirement on communications and so forth, a comprehensive evaluation is carried out on those system approaches in terms of system configurations， fault detection, location, isolation and restoration