An improved single-ended correlation-based fault location technique using traveling waves

Abstract An improved single-ended traveling wave (TW)-based fault location technique is proposed in this paper. It uses a correlation function to estimate the time delay between the fault-induced incident and reflected signals. Different from other classical one-ended correlation-based TW fault locators, the proposed algorithm does not depend on pre-classification of the fault type and it is not affected by low frequencies that may show up in the correlation function output. Besides, it needs only the first incident surge to be detected at the monitored bus by any TW-based detection method. Its validation is carried out through comparisons with the performance of one-terminal TW-based fault location approaches reported in the literature. The obtained results attest that the proposed technique is reliable and suitable to be used in fault location applications.