Gabor transform-based fault location method for multi-terminal transmission lines

Abstract Fault location in multi-terminal transmission lines is faced with different challenges such as high computation burden imposed by signal processing tools and different transmission line topologies. In this paper, a new method based on the Gabor transform (GT) for fault section determination and fault location calculation in multi-terminal lines is presented. The paper describes some benefits of the GT for analyzing modal components of synchronized current (or voltage) signals at all terminals. Then, to determine fault section and fault location, the arrival times of the first peak waves generated by the fault is utilized. One of the features of the GT is that it does not need to choose any tuning parameters. Moreover, it has robust performance under noisy conditions. The GT exerts low computation burden and it is based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), making it suitable for practical implementation. In this paper, the proposed method is also compared with a number of different fault location algorithms. The obtained numerical results under various fault conditions confirm the efficacy of the proposed method. The results also show that the proposed fault locator is independent of the power system configuration.