An Accurate PMU-Based Fault Location Scheme for Shunt-Compensated Transmission Lines

In this paper, an accurate fault location scheme based on phasor measurement unit (PMU) is proposed for shunt-compensated transmission lines. It is assumed that the voltage and current phasors on both sides of the shunt-compensated line have been provided by PMUs. In the proposed method, the faulted section is determined by presenting the absolute difference of positive- (or negative-) sequence current angles index, firstly. After determining faulted section, the voltage phasor at the shunt-compensator terminal is estimated via the sound section. The faulted section can be assumed as a perfect transmission line that synchronized voltage and current phasors at one end and voltage phasor at the other end are available. Secondly, a new fault location algorithm is presented to locate the precise fault point in the faulted section. In this algorithm, the location of the fault and the fault resistance are calculated simultaneously by solving an optimization problem, utilizing the heuristic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. The simulation results in MATLAB/SIMULINK platform demonstrate the high performance of the proposed method in finding the fault location in shunt-compensated transmission lines. The proposed scheme has high accuracy for both symmetrical and asymmetrical fault types and high fault resistance.