Traveling-Wave Detection Technique Using Short-Time Matrix Pencil Method

This paper proposes a new technique for detection of traveling-wave arrival times in power systems. Precise estimation of wave arrival times improves most of the traveling-wave-based fault location methods. The proposed technique is based on the short-time matrix pencil method that decomposes the measurement samples in a sliding window into time-indexed complex frequencies. Traveling-wave arrival times are estimated based on the fact that the extracted damping factors (i.e., the real part of the complex frequencies) are zero when the arriving wave is located in the middle of the sliding window. The proposed technique is compared to the existing transient-detection techniques such as discrete wavelet transform with commonly used mother wavelets and Hilbert transform (HT), using MATLAB Wavelet Toolbox and MATLAB HT. The sensitivity analysis based on the simulation results demonstrates that the proposed technique is less affected by the measurement noise, sampling frequency, and fault parameters.