Faulted feeder identification in active grounded networks

High impedance grounding systems offer great service continuity by limitation of fault currents during single line to ground faults. Recently, a new power electronic based grounding system has been presented, in which an adjustable current was injected into the neutral point. This active grounding system operates as a high impedance grounding system to reduce fault currents, as well as induced over-voltages. Identification of faulted feeder in a substation with some outgoing feeders from point of common coupling is a general issue in high impedance grounded networks. As a solution to this problem, this study proposes a new approach, to utilise the current injection capability of active grounding systems for detecting the faulted feeder while limiting the fault currents to an acceptable range. The proposed approach does not require any additional devices for faulted feeder detection. Moreover, it is able to identify the ground faults on the main bus. The proposed method is tested on two systems with different capacitive charging currents. Simulation results approve the high efficiency of the proposed method in faulted feeder identification.