Electric Power Systems Research 75 (2005) 51–55

Faults locations in automated distribution system

V.N. Gohokar ∗ , M.K. Khedkar
Power System Lab, Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj College of Engineering, Shegaon, Maharashtra 444203, India

Received 5 April 2004; received in revised form 2 November 2004; accepted 10 January 2005

Abstract

This paper presents new techniques for locating short circuit and open conductor faults on automated distribution system. This is a unique
method where short circuit and open conductor faults are treated simultaneously. The proposed fault location scheme is capable of accurately
identifying the zone in which fault occurs. Temporary faults are also detected which may not result in a blown fuse. Data is made available
to the substation remote terminal unit from various automated distribution system equipments. Decision is taken based upon the magnitude
of fundamental frequency component of voltage and current phasor. Testing of proposed fault location method has been demonstrated on the
laboratory model for its practical use. Analogues simulation results are obtained using electromagnetic transients program (EMTP).
© 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: Distribution automation; Symbolic method; Phasor estimation; Short circuit faults; Open conductor fault

1. Introduction current to the level below detection threshold of conventional

protection device. Recent advances in the digital technology
Distribution feeder constitutes the major link between the have enabled a solution for detection of a high percent of
power supply utility and consumers. Feeders are frequently these previously undetectable faults [1–3]. But the real time
subjected to the various types of faults like temporary short application of these solutions needs to be successfully imple-
circuits, permanent short circuits and open conductor high mented.
impedance fault. Detection of faulted zone is very essential Various short circuit fault location techniques have been
for restoration of supply to the healthy sections. Normally proposed in the literature. However, a survey of previous work
when temporary short circuit fault occurs, the feeder breaker has revealed that most of the fault location algorithms were
trips and automatically recloses number of times. Feeders in developed for transmission systems and are not suitable for
which there is no recloser facility, breaker is tripped once. radial distribution network [4,5].
These faults may not cause damage to utility equipment, but Fault locator, installed in the feeder, did not record tempo-
certainly cause malfunctioning of consumer computer based rary fault conditions due to short duration of voltage collapse.
or electronic switching equipment. Longer duration faults may lead to autorecloser operation, but
Detection of high impedance fault (HIF) on electric distri- the nature of faults or their locations may still be unknown un-
bution system has been one of the most persistent and diffi- til a permanent fault occurs. Other recent efforts have focused
cult problem facing the electric utility industry. In most of the on developing fault diagnosis system using knowledge ap-
cases open conductor HIF causes the personal injury. High proach [6]. Fault location technique presented in [7] is based
impedance faults result from the unwanted contact of a pri- upon the voltage and current signals at one end. Due to fre-
mary circuit conductor with objects or conductor that limit quent switching of fixed and switched capacitor for power
factor improvement and voltage regulation, harmonics are
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 7279 252478x201; generated. Thus, the current and voltage waveform may in-
fax: +91 7279 252346. clude high frequency harmonic distortion. This factor needs
E-mail address: [email protected] (V.N. Gohokar). to be considered while developing fault location technique.

0378-7796/$ – see front matter © 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

doi:10.1016/j.epsr.2005.01.003
52 V.N. Gohokar, M.K. Khedkar / Electric Power Systems Research 75 (2005) 51–55

With the addition of distribution automation features [8], it is

now possible to get the exact location of faulted zone. Fault in
a feeder having multiple laterals can also be located correctly.
This paper focuses on the description of the proposed
fault location technique and is organized as follows. First
the salient features of automated distribution system is intro-
duced which assists in the fault location technique. This is
followed by a description of phasor estimation and fault lo-
cation technique for short circuits and open conductor faults.
Then the fault location test on laboratory model is presented.
Finally results from conducted test on laboratory model are
shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault lo-
Fig. 2. Automated distribution system network.
cation scheme.

ability of this information at substation RTU greatly helps in

2. Automated distribution system location of faults in distribution system. Proposed symbolic
method is developed using above information.
Today, in distribution system planning, increasing atten- The study network is an 11 kV distribution network with
tion is being paid to improve customer service reliability. automation facility. It has four outgoing feeders as shown in
In a distribution system large number of equipments are in- Fig. 1. There are four links connected through route switches
stalled. Power supply covers industrial, commercial, residen- (normally opened). The statistics of substation is collected.
tial and agricultural consumers. Hence, considerable amount Based upon the actual data analysis, automation benefits are
of labour and expense are needed for monitoring and opera- extracted.
tion of distribution network. The complete analysis is carried out on these substation
Several studies on utility experience suggest that customer feeders. Number of sectionalizing switches is determined so
satisfaction is closely related with frequency of service inter- as to minimize the cost of outage. Sectionalizing switches
ruption and duration of service interruption. On the other and route switches are remotely operated switches, the sta-
hand, utilities are also facing some difficulties due to which tus of which can be continuously monitored by sub-station
they are not able to fulfill the requirement of consumers. personal computer. Fig. 2 shows automated system diagram
Distribution automation (DA) is a tool used to benefit the of four feeders with above facility. It has total 15 nodes and
consumer as well as utility. DA refers to automation of repet- 14 branches. At each node there is facility to open/close the
itive tasks on the electric utility distribution system. In DA feeder for reconfiguration as well as supply restoration. Links
system, normally closed sectionalizing switches (SSs) and are available between nodes 3–11, 4–15, 6–8 and 11–14. Bus
normally open route switches (RSs) are used to automate the number-1 is 11 kV substation bus assumed as a reference bus.
distribution feeder functions. These switches restrict the ex-
tent of disruption caused by long power interruption when
properly positioned. Current transformers and voltage trans- 3. Symbolic method
formers are mounted in each section. The status of load break
switches, SS, RS and RMS values and phase angle of section The voltage and current signals include large harmonics
current and voltage are made available from pole top remote and dc offset during the fault period. discrete Fourier trans-
terminal unit to substation remote terminal unit (RTU). Avail- form (DFT) is an excellent filter algorithm that can extinguish
harmonics using simple computation [9].
Estimation of fundamental frequency component is an es-
sential part of proposed method. Consider a period T and
continuous sinusoidal signal x(t). The DFT is used to eval-
uate the Fourier co-efficient from N samples of x(t) taken at
times t = 0, Ts , 2Ts , . . ., (N − 1)Ts , where Ts = T/N is the sam-
pling interval. The complex valued data sequence is obtained
by sampling at a finite number of frequency points. There-
fore, the input to the DFT is a sequence of samples rather than
a continuous function of time. The DFT of data sequence xm ,
m = 0, 1, 2, . . ., (N − 1) is defined as
N−1
1

Cf = xm e−j2πm/N (1)
N
Fig. 1. Substation under study. m=0
 V.N. Gohokar, M.K. Khedkar / Electric Power Systems Research 75 (2005) 51–55 53

where Cf is the complex Fourier coefficient. Eq. (1) can be and 12–13. Let us assume that the fault occurs in between
written as sections 11 and 12. The status is determined from each section
N−1   CT on this feeder. Polling for magnitude of current is started
1
2πm 2πm from substation end CT. Results of this polling is 1, 1, 1, 0
Cf = xm cos − j sin (2)
N N N and 0 means fault is in between buses 11 and 12.
m=0
However, the problem of fault location in the feeder hav-
or
ing laterals is more challenging. Consider the feeder-1 having
N−1  
1 1
2πm 2πm sections on main feeder as 1–2, 2–5, 5–6 and sections on lat-
(Cfr − jCfm ) = xm cos − j sin (3) eral as 2–3, 3–4. Let us assume that the fault occurs in between
2 N N N
m=0 sections 2 and 3. The CT placed on bus 2 is measuring sum
Therefore of load current at buses 3, 4, 5 and 6. The status detected by
above logic is 1 and 0 for sections 2–3 and 2–5 both. Actu-
N−1
2
2πm ally the fault is in between buses 2 and 3. This problem is
Cfr = xm cos (4)
N N solved by updating current and voltage vectors using static
m=0
impedance load model [5] as follows.
N−1 The data provided by a load flow program can be used
2
2πm
Cfm = xm sin (5) to account for laterals and voltage magnitude at a load bus
N N can be used to obtain equivalent load admittance. The series
m=0
impedance for each line section is calculated from knowledge
Eqs. (4) and (5) call full-cycle discrete Fourier transform
of construction configuration and is then used to determine
where Cfr and Cfm are the real and imaginary part of am-
the voltage drop of line section. The voltage and current pha-
plitude of fundamental frequency component of a phasor.
sor at each bus are updated using the equations summarized
So the amplitude C and phase angle φ of fundamental
below. This is illustrated as follows. Referring to sections 2–3
frequency component of a phasor are given by Eqs. (6) and
and 2–5, the load current at the bus may be described as
(7):
 [Iloadi ] = [Yloadi ][Vi ] (8)
C = Cfr2 + Cfm 2 (6)
  where Iloadi is the load current vector at bus I, Vi the voltage
Cfm vector at bus i, and Yloadi is the matrix representing the load
φ = tan−1 (7)
Cfr admittance at bus i.
As mentioned earlier analog current and voltage signals are From the network topology starting bus, ending bus,
made available at substation RTU. Based upon the sam- impedance of line section and real and reactive loading of
ples collected from CTs and PTs the rms value of voltage the buses is known. The status of voltage read by PTs shows
and current is determined from above technique. High fre- that the lateral ending bus voltage collapsed due to fault on
quency components are filtered out from the distorted wave- that section. Main feeder voltage is normal. After this first
form. Only fundamental component is considered for further guess for fault location, the voltage drop in both the section
decision-making process. is estimated by following set of equations. The load current at
ending bus does not change while starting end bus current is
updated by adding fault current. KCL at every node is given
3.1. Short circuit faults
by Eq. (9):
Comparing the magnitude of the current signals after fault [A]T [Ib ] = [Iload ] (9)
in all the sections, immediately the zone in which fault occurs
is identified. In the feeder having no laterals, it is very easy In order to accurately calculate the load current at each bus,
to locate the fault. The comparison of magnitude of current the updated bus voltage must be known. The updated voltage
in each section shows that the fault is in that section in which vectors are calculated as follows:
starting bus CT have fault current and ending bus CT have
normal current. This particular condition is read as symbols [Vi ] = [Vline ] − [Vd ] (10)
like digits 1 and 0. This status is monitored continuously for
where Vline is the voltage measured at the line terminal, and
each section CT. Under normal conditions, when there is no
Vd is the total voltage drop in the line section up to bus i.
fault on the system, the status is normal load current read as 0.
The equation for voltage drop in any zone may be stated
After fault the sections of faulted current towards substation
as
will have high fault current read as 1 and towards far end have
normal current read as 0. So the fault is detected in that section [Vd ] = [Zb ][Ib ], [Ib ] = [K][Iload ] (11)
where this status is 1 and 0. Rest of the section has status either
1 and 1 or 0 and 0. This is illustrated as follows. Consider the where Zb is the impedance of branch, and Ib is the current
feeder-3, shown in Fig. 2, having sections 1–10, 10–11, 11–12 flow in the branch.
54 V.N. Gohokar, M.K. Khedkar / Electric Power Systems Research 75 (2005) 51–55

The faulted feeder lateral voltage drop is more. No iterative

steps are needed to solve above set of equation.

3.2. Open conductor faults

Due to uncommon behavior, open conductor high

impedance fault is very difficult to formulate. As per the con-
sensus of the IEEE and Electric Power Research Institute
Reforms, the distinction of a down conductor condition from
the general case of HIF is highly desirable and a substation
based detector using existing current and voltage transducers
is preferred.
In most of the faults, a produced current level is indistin-
guishable from normal load current. Lowering the setting of
overcurrent or ground relays is unreliable for feeders with a
high degree of impedance. One of the observations made in
these types of faults is the rate of change of current. Change in
feeder load current occurs slowly but most of the HIFs current
do not change at all. Sometimes the behavior of distribution
system on HIFs is similar to power system operations such as
capacitor switching. The technique developed for short cir-
cuit faults can be applied for open conductor faults also. In
this case current flowing through end bus feeder CT is zero
and the current flowing through starting bus feeder is normal
load current plus the small value of HIF current. No difficulty
arises in case of feeder having laterals.
To distinguish between single-line-to-ground fault, line-
to-line fault, double-line-to-ground fault and three-phase
fault the change in the magnitude of the current phasor is
used. The maximum change of magnitude of current phasor
is used as a reference. The ratio of change of the magni-
tude of current phasor of each phase current to the reference
magnitude is calculated, where ratio for the phase used as a
reference is one. A phase is determined to be faulty if the
ratio of change in its current is greater than or equal to 0.75
[10].

4. Fault location test

The laboratory model of the automated distribution sys-

tem is developed. It is rated on the base of 250 V and 5 A.
Fig. 3. Results for short circuit fault on feeder-3 between sections 2 and 3.
Normal working load current is kept below one ampere so
as to accommodate fault current within the capacity of the
model components. Two types of signals namely analog in-
put and digital input are taken into the personal computer on normal load condition. After 50 ms fault is created on sec-
through data acquisition card PCL208 and 8255 pc add-on tions 2–3. The current read before 50 ms is the normal load
card. These cards are mounted on Pentium motherboard. The current and as soon as fault occurs the magnitude of current in
status of SS, RS and load break switches is known by reading the CTs located towards substation from fault point increase.
digital inputs. The signals coming from CTs and PTs form It is seen from waveform that symbols read from CT1 to CT5
the analog inputs. Samples from 15 CTs and PTs are read is 1, 1, 0, 0, and 0. This feeder have lateral also. The fault is
in personal computer. Feeder-1 is tested for fault in between suspected in zones 2–3 and 2–5. After estimating the voltage
sections 2 and 3. The waveforms obtained experimentally are drop in each section fault is confirmed in zone. Analogues re-
shown in Fig. 3(a)–(e). These figures titled CT1, CT2, CT3, sults are also obtained by simulating this feeder using EMTP
CT4, CT5 shows the current flowing through zones 1–2, 2–3, and are shown in Fig. 4(a)–(e). Similar test was carried out
3–4, 2–5, and 5–6. The laboratory test set is initially operated for open conductor fault on same feeder. It is observed that
 V.N. Gohokar, M.K. Khedkar / Electric Power Systems Research 75 (2005) 51–55 55

use of symbolic method for detection of short circuit fault

and open conductor fault in automated distribution system
correctly identifies the section in which fault occurs. Lateral
faults are also identified effectively. Application of distribu-
tion automation equipments minimizes the area in dark and
hence maximum consumers are benefited. Detection of high
impedance gives personal safety. Discrete Fourier Transform
extracts the fundamental frequency for decision-making in
location of faults.

Acknowledgement

Authors gratefully acknowledge the help from Maharash-

tra Sate Electricity Board, India for providing system data
and necessary discussion.

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