ICA feature extraction for the location and classification of faults in high-voltage transmission lines

Abstract Several methods for the location and classification of faults in power transmission lines using computational intelligence and digital signal processing techniques have been described in literature. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and wavelet transform (WT) have drawn significant attention lately, but they present some drawbacks when dealing with power systems faults where data are often contaminated by noise. This paper proposes an approach by combining independent component analysis (ICA) with travelling wave (TW) theory and support vector machine (SVM). The approach is adequate to locate and recognize faults in high-voltage (HV) transmission lines, while the acquired signals are noisy. Experiments performed for distinct types and locations of faults in a real transmission line model have shown that the proposed combined methods are able to provide excellent performance in fault location. The obtained errors are lower than 1% and accuracy is 100% for the classification of fault signals with noise. It can be stated that this method presents better performance than those regarding the main conventional techniques such as wavelets and neural networks in the presence of noise.