Traveling Wave-Based Fault Location on Half-Wavelength Transmission Lines

Transmission lines little longer than half-wavelength have been studied as an alternative for power transmission over very long distances. Recent studies about fault location procedures have proved that most impedance-based techniques are not able to correctly identify the fault point in this kind of line. In this paper, the performance of a two-terminal traveling wave-based fault location approach applied to a transmission line little longer than half-wavelength is investigated through simulations in the Alternative Transients Program (ATP), from which several fault scenarios in a 1000 kV AC line 2600 km long are analyzed. The obtained results indicate traveling wave-based approaches are robust to the atypical operation features of half-wavelength power transmission lines, being suitable for fault location applications in this kind of line.