A Novel Method of Fault Location for Single-Phase Microgrids

摘要

This paper presents a novel fault location method for single-phase microgrids. In order to locate a fault, a feature specific to the fault location is found, namely the maximum oscillation magnitude of the transient voltage signal induced by the fault. Our theoretical study and extensive simulations demonstrate that there is an approximated linear relationship between the maximum magnitude of the transient signal observed by a sensor, and the distance between the sensor and the fault location. Based on the discovered relationship, microgrid topology and sensor location information, we have designed an algorithm capable of locating the fault in the single-phase microgrids. The proposed fault location method has been implemented and validated through simulations in Electro-Magnetic Transients Program and MATLAB. The average localization error is less than 10% in the evaluation results, which manifests the significance of the novel method, as there is little research done for fault location in single-phase microgrids.