Fast fault location for fast restoration of smart electrical distribution grids

Distribution systems are evolving towards fault self-healing systems which can quickly identify and isolate faulted components and restore supply to the affected customers with little human intervention. A self-healing mechanism can considerably reduce the outage times and improve the continuity of supply; however, such an improvement requires a fast fault location method and also a communication and measurement infrastructure. In this paper the feasibility of fast service restoration through a fast fault location method is studied. A fast fault location method is proposed which is applicable to any distribution network with laterals, load taps and heterogeneous lines. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation tests on a real 13.8 kV, 134-node distribution system under different fault conditions. The results verify the applicability of the proposed architecture. We show that the communication delay plays a less important role in overall restoration time, and we stress the contribution of a fast fault location method in keeping the overall interruption time less than 1 minute.