High-Performance Arcing-Fault Location in Distribution Networks

Con Edison experiences more than 1000 arcing faults on its secondary distribution system each year. Arcing faults introduce strong harmonics into the power network. We propose a fast, low-cost, and high-performance approach to locating arcing faults based on harmonics. First, we implemented two novel algorithms. One is based on the voltage ratio of harmonics. This method can detect arcing fault one at a time. The second one is based on sparse sensing, which is a powerful technique that can detect multiple faults and is robust to measurement noise. Both methods require low-cost voltage measurements; no high-cost sensors are required. In addition, the computations can be done very quickly within a few cycles ($<$ 50 ms). Second, we have performed extensive simulation studies using the IEEE 14-bus system, IEEE 18-bus system, IEEE 118-bus system, and a 454-bus system. We only need to measure the voltages of a small percentage of the nodes. For example, voltages from only 20% of the nodes in a 454-bus system are needed for accurate fault location. Multiple simultaneous faults can be located. All the results clearly demonstrated the location accuracy of our algorithms.