A Hybrid Method Based on Optimized Neuro-Fuzzy System and Effective Features for Fault Location in VSC-HVDC Systems

One of the most important issues with HVDC systems are the occurrence of various faults that can lead to considerable electrical power losses, serious damage to expensive equipment and huge financial losses. Hence, it is highly required to design an accurate and automatic fault location method in HVDC systems for maintaining uninterrupted supply of energy and protecting sensitive equipment such as rectifiers and inverters. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new hybrid system based on adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) with optimal parameters and Hilbert-Huang (HH) transform for fault location in voltage sourced converter-HVDC (VSC-HVDC) systems. The proposed fault location method consists of three major sections. In the first section, HH transform is applied to extract new features from current signal. In the second part, ANFIS uses the extracted features to estimate the fault location in transmission lines. Learning algorithm determines the accuracy and efficiency of each machine-learning algorithm. In the third section of the developed system, enhanced version of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm named chaotic dynamic weight PSO (CDWPSO) algorithm is implemented as learning algorithm to train the ANFIS. The developed fault detection and location system was tested on a VSC-HVDC system with 250 km length and the obtained results using MATLAB simulations have shown that combination of new features, and CDWPSO-based ANFIS has high accuracy in fault detection and location in VSC-HVDC systems. High fault location accuracy, robust performance of neuro-fuzzy system, optimal training of ANFIS, extraction of novel effective features from current signal and fault location only with six features are the main contribution of the developed system.