An adaptive fault locator for transmission lines tapped with a source of generation-using synchronized voltage and current phasors

With the advent of the high synchronism accuracy of modern phasor measurement units (PMUs), an adaptive PMU-based approach using the concept of superimposed voltage and current phasors for accurately locating fault on transmission lines tapped with a source of generation is described. This paper proposes a novel faulted section discrimination index and takes the effects caused by tapped lines into account. In addition, an adaptive scheme to estimate the equivalent source impedance outside the considered transmission lines is also presented. The Alternative Transients Program (ATP) simulator is used to validate the proposed fault location approach with respect to typical faults on a 100 km, 161 kV transmission line. The simulation results show that the accuracy of the proposed technique achieved can be up to 99.99% under different fault resistance, fault locations, pre-fault load conditions, various source impedances and various fault types.