Optimised Time for Travelling Wave Fault Locators in the Presence of Different Disturbances Based on Real-World Fault Data

The real-world travelling wave fault data investigated in this paper indicate disturbances generate unpredictable, non-stationary and random waveforms which may cause maloperation of protection and control elements in a power system including travelling wave fault locators (TWFL). This type of fault locator is directly dependent on the detection of an accurate time of arrival (ToA) of travelling waves (TW) generated by a fault. This detection becomes complicated in the presence of disturbances when their ToAs are detected earlier than the fault TWs. Since travelling waves occur in the high-frequency bands (e.g. >50 kHz), in this paper a capacitor voltage transformer is employed to measure the TW voltage signals; this involves acquiring the current flowing to the ground and removing the low-frequency components (50/60 Hz). Disturbances create high magnitude pulses in the pre-fault section of a TW fault signal that last for a short time. Therefore, the time when a TWFL starts its computations requires to be optimised so that the effect of the disturbances is eliminated. The analysis techniques mentioned in this paper are based on real-world travelling wave fault data, and the solution uses statistical tools, such as cost function, mean and standard deviation, alongside Digital Signal Processing algorithms.