A Practical Integrated Fault Location Technique for Radial Power Distribution Systems

power distribution systems (PDS) are becoming more complex and dispersed at long distances and different locations. With its radial and several laterals configuration, loads could be connected at similar distances from the substation which leads to a multi estimation of fault location and consuming more time for iterative fault location algorithms. In order to overcome those difficulties, a practical integrated fault location method for radial PDS is presented in this paper. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to partition a multi lateral distribution system to possible mono lateral system (MLSs) by a proposed communicant sensor (CS). Then an impedance based algorithm is applied only at the faulty MLS. To examine the whole method in the field, a real PDS from the Algerian distribution grid is used. Experimental results present significant benefits compared to a previous method reported in the literature.