A PLC communication characteristics-based fault location method in MV
meshed distribution networks
Abstract
A power line carrier (PLC) communication characteristics-based method is
proposed for single-phase-to-ground fault location in neutral isolated
medium voltage (MV) meshed distribution networks in this paper. The
carrier signals with a time-varying frequency and constant amplitude are
processed by a set of PLC transmitters and receivers, whose placement is
optimized by regarding the power network as an undirected graph. Two
signal encoding and decoding algorithms for the PLC terminals are
proposed to avoid using expensive timing systems between the terminals.
The fault location technique is implemented by comparing the cosine
similarity of amplitude attenuation (AA) and phase offset (PO) between
the fault and a library. The node corresponding to the maximum cosine
similarity of the characteristics between the present fault and the
library is selected as the location of the current fault. Only one set
of low-cost PLC communication terminals and the widely available power
lines are needed in the fault location system, making this approach
highly practical. Numerical simulations using MATLAB/Simulink have been
performed to verify the technique’s feasibility. The results show that
the method can accurately locate faults in neutral isolated MV meshed
distribution networks. Besides, the presented approach achieves high
accuracy in estimating transition resistance values.