Fault Location in Power Networks Using a Sparse Set of Digital Fault Recorders

This paper presents a robust fault location method that can be used for radial or meshed power systems. It addresses several challenges encountered in previous work such as signal attenuation by power transformers, measurement errors, the impact of Inverter Based Power Sources (IBPSs), differentiating faults from other events. This is accomplished via a KMeans clustering of DFRs and using a weighted directed tree model enabling accurate fault location. The proposed algorithm is tested on both transmission and distribution systems under different fault scenarios.