An effective fault location technique for transmission grids using phasor measurement units

This paper presents an effective fault location technique for transmission grids based on phasor measurement units (PMUs). High accuracy in fault location is achieved by using both the fault observability with PMUs placement and an accurate distributed parameter line model for the transmission lines. The work performed in this paper is provided with high performance which is simplicity, sensitivity, stability and featuring robustness to the uncertainties in fault inception angle, load current and fault path resistance, and the accuracy and reliability of the calculation for the technique is very high. This paper illustrates the characteristics of the proposed algorithm and evaluates its performance by using transient fault data obtained from PSCAD/EMTDC simulations. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.