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Intelligent Fault Location for Smart Power Grids

Modernized and advanced electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure ensures reliable, efficient, and affordable delivery of electric power. The complexity of fault location problem increases with the proliferation of unusual topologies and with the advent of renewable energy-based power generation in the smart grid environment. The proliferation of new Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) provides a venue for the implementation of more accurate and intelligent fault location methods. This dissertation focuses on intelligent fault location methods for smart power grids and it aims at improving fault location accuracies and decreasing the cost and the mean time to repair damaged equipment in major power outages subsequently increasing the reliability of the grid.

The developed methods utilize wavelet transformation to extract the traveling wave information in the very fast voltage and current transients which are initiated immediately after a fault occurs, support vector machines to classify the fault type and identify the faulted branches and finally Bewley diagrams to precisely locate the fault. The approach utilizes discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) for analysis of transient voltage and current measurements. The transient wavelet energies are calculated and utilized as the input for support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. SVM learns the mapping between inputs (i.e. transient voltages and/or currents wavelet energies) and desired outputs (i.e. faulty phase and/or faulty section) through processing a set of training cases.

This dissertation presents the proposed methodologies applied to three complex power transmission systems. The first transmission system is a three-terminal (teed) three-phase AC transmission network, a common topology in high- and extra high-voltage networks. It is used to connect three substations that are wide apart from each other through long transmission lines with a tee-point, which is not supported by a substation nor equipped with a measuring device. The developed method overcomes the difficulties introduced by the discontinuity: the tee point. The second topology is a hybrid high voltage alternative current (HVAC) transmission line composed of an overhead line combined with an underground cable. The proposed fault location method is utilized to overcome the difficulties introduced by the discontinuity at the transition point from the overhead line to the underground cable and the different traveling wave velocities along the line and the cable. The third topology is a segmented high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line including an overhead line combined with an underground cable. This topology is widely utilized to transmit renewable energy-based electrical power from remote locations to the load centers such as from off-shore wind farms to on-shore grids.

This dissertation introduces several enhancements to the existing fault type and fault location algorithms: improvement in the concept of fault type classification and faulty section identification by using SVMs with smaller inputs and improvements in the fault location in the complex configurations by utilizing less measurements from the terminals. / Ph. D.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/46788
Date24 March 2014
CreatorsLivani, Hanif
ContributorsElectrical and Computer Engineering, De La Ree, Jaime, Evrenosoglu, Cansin Yaman, Baumann, William T., Centeno, Virgilio A., Gugercin, Serkan
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/octet-stream
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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