Stand Alone Distribution Feeder Inter Area fault Location Identification System for Indian Utility

India is a developing country and the major power behind developing the country is its incredible power handling as well as dispensing capability. The number of utility consumers per unit area is increasing day by day which in turn leads to transmission system complexity. Also, the distance which each feeder should be fed is exponentially becoming lengthier/loaded compare to that of year's back. Such a system is expected to experience various faults at any time and therefore Smart Systems should be developed/incorporated in order to manage such complex systems. The work presented here looks into the inter-area fault location which exactly locates the fault origin area. As mentioned earlier, the distribution side is comparatively much longer with added complexities; the identification of fault location is difficult for the lineman during fault cases. The different faults which occur in a transmission system are line to ground fault (L-G) line to line fault (L-L) line-line-line to ground fault (L-L-L-G) and leakage fault. In such cases, the lineman has to inspect the particular feeder from one end to the other for identifying the fault which is a tedious job in all sense. Here we propose the new system to identify the exact location of the fault i.e., by using co-ordinate operation of an adaptive sensor and relays. A communication controller platform is designed to detect and communicate the contingency cases and then report it immediately to local remote station. An adaptive voltage sensor is installed at feeders and is coordinated well to obtain the line parameters during contingencies. This data is fed to a micro controller which processes the data and if a fault occurs the exact location of the fault will be sent to an Android Operating System. From the system, by using an Android Application, precise fault location is displayed. This can also be used as a future data collection method for load variation, power factor variations etc. in a transmission system.