A Traveling-Wave-Based Amplitude Integral Busbar Protection Technique

This paper proposes an extra high-speed busbar protection technique according to the propagation theory of traveling wave. When the fault occurs on the busbar, the detected initial traveling waves on all connected lines will come from their back, which are defined as positive direction traveling waves. While a fault occurs on any one of these lines, the detected initial traveling waves on all healthy lines are positive direction traveling waves; however, the traveling wave direction on the faulted line is negative. Within a short duration of postfault, a criterion discriminating fault direction can be established according to the amplitude integral relationships between the positive direction traveling wave and the negative direction traveling wave. Analyzing the detected traveling wave directions for all lines, a distributed busbar protection scheme can be constructed. To evaluate the proposed technique, a typical busbar model was built. Simulation results show that the proposed method can rapidly and reliably discriminate the internal faults from external faults, and the protection performances are immune to fault resistances, fault inception angles, fault types, and current-transformer saturation.