A Facility for Physical Simulation of High Impedance Faults in Low Voltage Networks

High impedance fault detection is an active research area, and is important to distribution power system operators. Research to date has focused on new sensor technologies and signal processing schemes to detect these faults. However, development of these schemes requires real fault incident data. Experimental HIF data at low voltage (0.4 kV) are currently unavailable, therefore we have designed a low voltage test facility design to physically simulate HIFs. The facility includes the geometrical representation of actual low voltage distribution lines, as an objective of the facility is for its use in the evaluation of (Giant Magneto-resistance) GMR sensors as a basis for a fault detection system. The initial HIF experimental data collected in this facility demonstrates the capability of the test facility to simulate such faults. The test facility will therefore be beneficial for generating actual data for studying HIF phenomena and for the development of a GMR sensor based detection scheme. This will be the subject of ongoing work.