Incipient Faults Monitoring in Underground Medium Voltage Cables of Distribution Systems Based on a Two-Step Strategy

Incipient faults in underground cables are often resulted from electric stress and cable aging. If such faults occur as current spikes in short periods, permanent faults may appear. Moreover, incipient faults may disturb electricity transmissions because of detection delays and thus, precise well-timed protection decisions cannot be made. Therefore, one of the most important considerations of utilities in the monitoring process is to recognize this type of faults from other conditions as soon as possible. In this paper, a precise approach based on CUmulative SUM and ADAptive LInear NEuron has been proposed. In addition to its high-speed detection ability, the practical on-line implementation of the proposed approach is simple as well. The simulation results in EMTPWorks environment demonstrate that the proposed approach has a strong capability in distinguishing the cable incipient faults from other similar conditions in distribution systems.