Heuristic Method for Fault Location in Distribution Feeders With the Presence of Distributed Generation

This paper presents a fault location method for power distribution networks with the presence of distributed generation (DG) units along their feeders. The proposed fault location method is based on voltage and current phasor quantities, calculated from measurements provided by intelligent electronic devices installed only at the substation bus, and on information about the electrical parameters of the feeders, stored in the utility's database. It is capable of correctly locating the fault point using detailed models of the feeder's line sections, information about the impedances of the loads, and the equivalent circuits of the DG units connected to the feeder. The proposed method relies on an optimization process that estimates the fault point using the Pattern Search method. A typical distribution feeder was implemented using EMTP/ATP and test data produced during the simulations were used to evaluate the method's performance. The simulations considered variations of the fault type and phases involved, variations of the fault resistance, and input data errors. The results indicate that the method is robust and provides a high level of accuracy.