Accelerated distance protection for transmission lines based on accurate fault location

Abstract

The accelerated operation of distance relay is an important issue to improve the power system stability. The zone-1 of distance relay usually covers about 80% of the transmission line length with an instantaneous operation, while during resistive faults the coverage of zone-1 may be reduced considerably. Therefore, the conventional distance relay cannot cover the whole line length with fast fault clearance. To address the above problem, a non-pilot protection scheme based on the accurate fault location estimation is proposed. When a fault occurs at the end section of the line, after the fast remote circuit breaker (RCB) operation, the accurate amount of fault current can be obtained. Using this current, the accurate fault location is calculated, and as a result, the accelerated trip can be issued to the local circuit breaker (CB) for the faults occurring at all the total line length including the end section faults. The obtained fault location formula is independent of the fault resistance and remote source impedances and can be applied to both single- and three-pole CB operation modes. The proposed high-speed protection scheme is evaluated in the WSCC 9-bus system. Numerous PSCAD simulation studies verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed scheme. 2021