Adaptive load blinder for distance protection

This paper proposes a novel adaptive load blinder for distance protection. A distance relay can provide remote backup protection by zones 2 and 3, but it may mal-operate under heavy loading conditions and cause cascading trips in the network, which could further lead to a widespread blackout. To prevent cascading outages, load blinders or load encroachment elements are generally used to block the distance relay when there is heavy load in the system. However, these elements are not always able to discriminate heavy loading conditions from fault conditions, especially for heavy loads with low power factors or faults with fault resistance. This paper presents a novel load blinder scheme for distance protection by using artificial neural network (ANN). Test results show that the proposed ANN-based load blinder scheme is able to discriminate between different heavy loads with a wide range of power factors and different faults with fault resistance. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.