An Effective Method Based on Time Reversal and Optimization Techniques for Locating Faults on Power Grids

摘要

Electromagnetic time reversal (EMTR) has recently emerged as a promising technique applied for locating faults in power networks. It directly transposes the idea of focusing energy back to its source introduced in original time-reversal (TR) methods. Accordingly, we present in this paper, FasTR, a method based on the tenets of TR, that estimates the fault location by employing optimization based algorithms for fetching the highest peak amplitude with maximum coherence in space and time . However, it uses an alternative approach for executing the cumbersome TR post-processing, thanks to a simplified analytical model capable of evaluating the voltage (or current) at any position and any instant of the tested network resulting from the back-injection of the recorded time-revered signals. FasTR is shown to accurately locate a fault in a complex network with just a basic knowledge of its topology in no more than a couple tens of seconds. More importantly is its ability to locate multiple faults in non-homogeneous networks. The performance of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulations as well as an experimental setup by making reference to a reduced-scale coaxial cable network where real faults are hardware-emulated.