Date of Award

Summer 8-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical Engineering

Abstract

The accuracy of fault location is an integral part of power system operations. Improved fault location can reduce maintenance time, increase efficiency, and save money. When a fault occurs, it sends a disturbance in the current and voltage in each direction at almost the speed of light. This disturbance is called a traveling wave, and can be used to locate faults. In efforts to increase accuracy, the use of traveling wave theory to locate faults has become more popular.

This thesis goes through the process of designing and testing a traveling wave fault locator. The design includes analog and digital filtering of the traveling wave signal. The signal passes through an analog high-pass filter that eliminates the fundamental frequency component, an analog low-pass filter that eliminates aliasing, a digital lowpass filter to smooth out the signal, a differentiator to determine the signal’s time of arrival, and a peak finder to detect the exact time. Using PSCAD and MATLAB, the traveling wave relay is analyzed with single line-to-ground and line-to-line faults on a power system comparable to the IEEE 9-bus system. The results show that this fault locator is accurate within ±200 feet from the fault on a 105-mile line when optimized.

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