Fault location in multilateral distribution network with electric vehicle charging load

Abstract

In a multilateral distribution network, faults at different locations can generate the same voltage and current at the substation; hence, the calculated fault location can correspond to several places in the network. To avoid this major problem, a two‐terminal travelling wave‐based fault location method is presented in this article, which at first identifies the faulted lateral in the distribution network and then estimates the exact fault location. The proposed fault location scheme uses wavelet energy entropy of the recorded three‐phase current signals and the magnitude of ground mode component wavelet modulus maxima (WMM) for fault detection and fault type identification in the network. After that, the faulted lateral identification followed by the exact fault location is performed using the aerial mode component WMM of the fault‐generated current transients. Since the integration of electric vehicle (EV) charging load is increasing day by day to the distribution network, the performance of the proposed algorithm is tested with EV charging load along with distributed generation integrated into the distribution network. Modeling and simulation of the distribution network and EV load are performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The simulation results show that the proposed method can accurately locate fault under different operating conditions.

Localized Protection of Radial DC Microgrids With High Penetration of Constant Power Loads

“…The traveling-wave-based fault location method is presented in [23], which records the first arrival time of current after a fault at all terminals of a dc system, and the graph theory is used to extract the feature of current to locate the fault. In [24], the fault location of a dc system equipped with electric vehicle charging loads is suggested. It uses a signal processing method, wavelet transform, to estimate the location of the fault.…”

“…communication infrastructure, and it increases the cost; however, Kumar and Saxena [24] eliminates the communication links in the presented scheme, but the error of fault location rises to 16%. The methods mentioned in [22] and [23] use traveling wave transients, and they are local and communication-based fault location schemes, respectively.…”