Voltage Distribution-Based Fault Location for Half-Wavelength Transmission Line with Large-Scale Wind Power Integration in China

Large-scale wind farms are generally far away from load centers, hence there is an urgent need for a large-capacity power transmission scheme for extremely long distances, such as half-wavelength transmission lines (HWTLs), which can usually span thousands of kilometers from large-scale wind farms to load centers. An accurate fault location method for HWTLs is needed to ensure safe and reliable operation. This paper presents the design of a modal voltage distribution-based asynchronous double-end fault location (MVD-ADFL) scheme, in which the phase voltages and currents are transformed to modal components through a Karenbauer transformation matrix. Then, the modal voltage distributions along transmission lines are calculated by voltage and current from double ends. Moreover, the minimums and intersection points of calculated modal voltages from double ends are defined as the fault location estimation. In order to identify incorrect fault location results and reduce calculation errors for the correct ones, air modal and earth modal voltage distributions are applied in the fault location estimations. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach under different fault resistances, distances, and types. Lastly, a real-time digital simulator (RTDS)-based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test is undertaken to validate the feasibility of implementing the proposed approach.