Fault Location in Meshed and Active Power Distribution Networks

This paper presents an effective fault location method for active distribution networks with radial and/or meshed typologies. Historically, most distribution networks have been radially configured and operated due to their passive characteristics containing no active power sources. However, recent increase in the number of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) forced these networks to be configured and operated more like transmission systems containing meshed sections. This change presents several challenges one of which is detection and location of faults. This paper presents a practical and effective approach to address this challenge. It requires a limited number of digital fault recorders (DFR) to be placed and uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to compute the first arrival times of fault-generated traveling waves. Details of the proposed procedure are given in the paper. IEEE 123-Node Test Feeder is used to validate the method under different fault conditions using the EMTP RV program and Matlab as the simulation tools.