Modeling and simulation of intermittent arc effects on traveling wave based fault location techniques for distribution network

With rapidly developing of the distribution networks the rate of the earth fault increases sharply. Aiming to fault location for distribution networks, many techniques are proposed and applied in distribution networks throughout the world. However, until now the technology for precise fault point location has not been successfully implemented in engineering practice. Traveling wave based methods as common techniques are widely applied in transmission line protection for locating fault point. However, these methods face severe challenge in fault location for distribution networks. The main reason is that the intermittent arc fault easily results in failure of detecting inceptive travelling wave and this intermittent arc is a common earth fault in distribution networks compared with transmission networks. In this paper, a simplified distribution line is built by making reference to the two parallel lossless transmission lines system. Then, the intermittent arc effects on traveling wave based method are modeled and discussed. Finally, the reason why these travelling wave based methods are hard to locate fault point precisely is illustrated.