Traveling wave - based transmission line fault location using maathematical morphology without synchronization system and line parameters

Accurate fault location in a transmission line system is very important for electric utilities in order to quickly diagnose the location of the fault. Using a suitable technique for accurate fault location effectively reduces the time of fault recovery and system operation cost during maintenance. As a result, the reliability and quality of electricity delivery is improved and the economic losses caused by line outages are reduced. In this paper, an accurate two-terminal traveling wave-based fault location method for transmission lines is proposed. In this method, based on the arrival time of the first and second traveling waves caused by the short circuit fault, which are measured separately at both terminals of the transmission line, fault location and fault inception time are determined. The proposed algorithm does not need to synchronize data, transmission line  parameters, and traveling wave speed, which are sources of error in traveling wave-based fault location methods.  In order to better analyse fault-induced transient signals and detects the arrival time of travelling waves, mathematicl morphology filter (MMF) is used. Several faults on a typical 400 kV, 200 km transmission line were simulated using EMTP  and MATLAB programs. The simulation results verified the proposed algorithm is able to accurately locate faults on transmission line. Also, the proposed method is independent of fault conditions shch as fault impedance, fault type, fault inception time and fault location.