Ground fault through transition resistance is common in power systems highly impacting the correct action of protection. To improve the reliability of power systems;
a random matrix based method is used in this paper as a backup protection to detect the high-resistance grounding fault;
on the basis of successive PMU voltage measurements. The vector model consists of matrix decomposition;
Gaussian noise and the fluctuation components of PMU voltage measurements. Under a failure scenario;
the sample covariance matrix combined by such successive models is influenced exclusively by the perturbation matrix related to the change of admittance matrix. This remarkable characteristic can be used to detect high-resistance grounding fault. For simplicity;
only symmetric fault is analyzed. The simulation results based on IEEE-30 bus system verify the feasibility of the method. © 2016 IEEE;