An efficient fault location estimation algorithm for STATCOM-compensated transmission lines

An accurate fault location estimation (FLE) helps in quick power system restoration in the event of transmission lines exposed to faults. However, the accuracy of FLE gets affected in shunt FACTS-compensated system. Therefore, it is indispensable to develop an efficient FLE algorithm which serves the purpose of accurate estimation of fault location in shunt-compensated system. Consequently, this paper proposes a traveling wave-based FLE algorithm utilizing short-time matrix pencil method (STMPM) to estimate the fault location in the aforementioned system. In the proposed algorithm, STMPM is used to decompose windowed signal into time-indexed complex frequencies. From the fact that damping factors extracted from complex frequencies are near or equal to zero when the arriving traveling waves after inception of fault are at the middle of sliding window, the arrival time of waves is estimated and fault location is obtained. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is tested on 100 MVAR STATCOM-compensated 500 kV transmission system under several fault scenarios and diverse operating conditions. The performance of STMPM-based FLE algorithm is compared with that of the existing methods and found to be more robust and reliable. Further, real-time validation of the proposed algorithm is carried out in OPAL-RT environment.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a traveling wave-based fault location estimation algorithm using the short-time matrix pencil method (STMPM) to accurately estimate the fault location in shunt-compensated systems. The algorithm decomposes the windowed signal into time-indexed complex frequencies and estimates the arrival time of waves to obtain the fault location. The proposed algorithm is compared with existing methods and found to be more robust and reliable.