A novel fault location scheme for multi-terminal transmission lines based on principle of double-ended traveling wave

In view of the poor accuracy in present fault location methods for multi-terminal transmission lines, a fault location method based on the principle of double-ended traveling wave is applied to fault location for multi-terminal transmission lines and a novel traveling wave based fault location scheme for multi-terminal transmission lines based on fast intrinsic mode decomposition (FIMD) and Teager energy operator (TEO) is proposed. Firstly, FIMD is applied to aerial mode component of each measured current wave and TEO is applied to calculate the instantaneous energy of first intrinsic mode function (IMF1), whose frequency is the highest among intrinsic mode functions obtained from FIMD, and the arrival time of initial fault traveling wave can be determined according to the first sudden arising of energy in the instantaneous energy of IMF1; secondly, the principle of double-ended traveling wave and the arrival times of the initial fault traveling waves are used to form the identification matrix for the faulty section, and the faulty section can be identified according to characteristics of elements in the formed identification matrix; finally, the busbar, which can form most two terminal lines through the fault point, is selected as the initial terminal and the fault distances of these double-ended sections from the initial point via faulty point to other nodes are calculated, and the average value of these fault distances is taken as the final fault distance. Result of PSCAD/EMTDC based simulation of a 220kV transmission network with five terminals shows that using the proposed method the arrival time of initial fault traveling wave can be detected accurately and rapidly, and then the faulty section can be located exactly.