Asynchronous Fault Location Scheme Based on Voltage Distribution for Three-Terminal Transmission Lines

The synchronization of the voltage and current from different terminals is generally unachievable in the power grids at mountainous area, which leads to the fault location method with synchronized data to be impossibly utilized. This paper proposes a voltage distribution based fault location scheme with asynchronous data for three-terminal transmission lines. At first, the faulty section is identified by the voltage computed from each terminal due to the boundaries formed by fault point and tee-point. Since the fault current is stable after the transients decay, the asynchronous calculated voltage and current from the terminals without faults can be synchronized by their angle differences to form the voltage and current at faulty section near the tee-point. Then, the voltage distribution of the faulty section can be obtained from the tee-point and the terminal to find the intersection point of them. In order to fully utilize the fault characteristics in the voltage and current, the earth mode and the minimum of the voltage distribution are applied to optimize the fault location results for grounding faults and multi-phase faults, respectively. Moreover, the robustness of the proposed fault location scheme is thoroughly validated by the simulation of PSCAD/EMTDC. At last, a set of the field data acquired by wave recorders is applied to test the feasibility of the proposed approach.