Automated fault location and diagnosis on electric power distribution feeders

This paper presents new techniques for locating and diagnosing faults on electric power distribution feeders. The proposed fault location and diagnosis scheme is capable of accurately identifying the location of a fault upon its occurrence, based on the integration of information available from disturbance recording devices with knowledge contained in a distribution feeder database. The developed fault location and diagnosis system can also be applied to the investigation of temporary faults that may not result in a blown fuse. The proposed fault location algorithm is based on the steady-state analysis of the faulted distribution network. To deal with the uncertainties inherent in the system modeling and the phasor estimation, the fault location algorithm has been adapted to estimate fault regions based on probabilistic modeling and analysis. Since the distribution feeder is a radial network, multiple possibilities of fault locations could be computed with measurements available only at the substation. To identify the actual fault location, a fault diagnosis algorithm has been developed to prune down and rank the possible fault locations by integrating the available pieces of evidence. Testing of the developed fault location and diagnosis system using field data has demonstrated its potential for practical use.