Model-based transmission line fault location methods: A review

Accurate fault location methods for transmission lines are essential to ensure secure and reliable operation of power systems. Among various fault location approaches, model-based fault location methods are widely adopted in practical power systems since they are compatible with typical data acquisition systems and have clear physical meanings. There are extensive phasor domain and time domain model-based approaches in the existing literature, however, the connections among various line models, as well as corresponding fault location approaches, are not fully investigated. To this end, this paper first systematically reviews transmission line modeling framework for fault location, including time domain and phasor domain matrix/scalar form lumped/ distributed parameter models. The relationships between these models are carefully presented and discussed, with clear assumptions for each model. Next, different phasor domain and time domain model-based fault location methods using various line models are shown in detail. Finally, numerical experiments verify the differences between different model-based methods and the importance to use accurate line models for transmission line fault location. The results also clearly indicate the advantages of time domain model-based methods over phasor domain methods: the time domain approaches can accurately locate faults using a short data window within half a cycle after the fault occurs. Compared to traveling wave based methods, the time domain modelbased methods are compatible with available data acquisition hardware in substations, with a relatively low sampling rates of several kilo-samples/sec.