Travelling wave fault location of transmission line using wavelet transform

This paper presents a new fault location principle based on the double terminal methods of travelling waves using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Due to the attenuation and distortion of travelling wave propagation in a transmission line, a open problem is how to define the arrival time and the propagation velocity of the travelling wave correctly. Since CWT has much better resolution for locating a transient event in time-domain, the arrival time can be defined by a characteristic point of the travelling wave extracted by a suitable continuous wavelet with the optimal dilation parameters, and the propagation velocity depends on the physical configuration of a transmission line and the optimal dilation parameters. Extensive simulation results show that the new method has a location accuracy within /spl plusmn/ one tower span in the case of various grounding resistances, different fault positions and different line configurations.