Robust Fault location for Two and Three Terminal Lines Using Synchronized Phasor Measurements

This project introduces a robust fault location method that utilizes wide area

phasor measurements and sparse estimation technique. The proposed method

transforms the fault location problem into estimating sparse bus injections in the

network, based upon the equivalence in the change of bus voltages between a fault

current drawn at an arbitrary point along a line and virtual superimposed current

injections at the terminal nodes of the same line. This equivalence not only works for

two terminal lines but also three terminal lines. Assuming limited placement of phasor

measurements, an underdetermined linear estimation problem whose solution is sparse

will be formed. This problem can be solved via sparse estimation especially L1

regularization technique. Considering possible failure of individual measurement units,

an extended formulation incorporating sparse error vector is used to increase the

method’s robustness. Extensive simulation results have verified the effectiveness of the

proposed method.

About the author:

Guangyu Feng received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua

University, Beijing, China in 2013. She's currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Her

research interests include power system fault identification, computation and

optimization methods.