A Fault Location Method Using Direct Convolution: Electromagnetic Time Reversal or Not Reversal

Electromagnetic time reversal (EMTR) is drawing increasing interest in short-circuit fault location. In this article, we investigate the classic EMTR fault location methods and find that it is not necessary to reverse the obtained signal in time which is a standard operation in these methods before injecting it into the network. The effectiveness of the EMTR fault location method results from the specific similarity of the transfer functions in the forward and reverse processes. Therefore, we can inject an arbitrary type and length of source in the reverse process to locate the fault. Based on this observation, we propose a new EMTR fault location method using direct convolution. This method is different from the traditional methods, and it only needs to precalculate the assumed fault transients for a given network, which can be stored in embedded hardware. The faults can be located efficiently via direct convolution of the signal collected from a fault and the prestored calculated transients, even using a fraction of the fault signal.