Fault location in overhead transmission line: A novel non-contact measurement approach for traveling wave-based scheme

Traveling wave fault location methods have gained considerable growth over the years, with the anticipation that power systems will be accurate and reliable everywhere. But the performance of classical traveling wave methods has focused only on traditional current transformer measurement in the literature till date. Therefore, in this paper, an innovative non-contact measurement of traveling wave formulation is proposed to achieve accurate fault location and time of arrival detection on a two-terminal overhead transmission line, since power cable naturally generates magnetic and electrical fields in the surrounding atmosphere. The proposed method solitary depends on the first two and successive time differences between the incident and reflective wave from the fault point of the transmission line. Thus, the proposed scheme does not depend on current transformer measurement that stimulates the accuracy and reliability of the conventional traveling wave fault location method. To ensure an accurate time of arrival waves detection, we exploit the magnetic field sensor array on each tower to measure the quality of current traveling waves generated on the transmission line and locate the transient disturbances as a result of a short circuit. By analyzing the line energization, a comprehensive fault analysis on a 500-kV line was simulated with PSCAD/MATLAB toolbox compared to the two-terminal classical method. The sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the proposed method is much accurate and reliable to be deployed and cost-effective, making it highly useful and efficient in comparison to the classical two terminals traveling wave method with an average error of 0.014%. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by laboratory experimental setup.