TÉCNICAS ALGORÍTMICAS DE LOCALIZACIÓN DE FALLAS COMO ALTERNATIVA PARA REDUCIR EL EFECTO DE LAS SALIDAS EN SISTEMAS DE POTENCIA - UNA REVISIÓN

Due to the increasing importance of the power quality indexes follow the deregulation of the electrical markets, the service continuity is one of the most important concerns to the utility company. A fault often resulting in power interruption is more prominent in the distribution systems, because feeders are prone to faults caused by a variety of situations such as bad weather conditions, equipment failure, vegetation growing, traffic accidents, etc. When a fault occurs on a distribution line it is essential for the utility to identify the fault location as soon as possible for the reason of maintain the service quality. This includes restoring power to the rest of the system by isolating the faulted section and sending repair crews to the fault site to for repair work. In order to accomplish these tasks in fairly quick time an efficient fault location technique should be in place. Several fault location techniques are proposed in the literature. Knowledge based techniques which are successfully used in transmission systems, often rely on external information such as SCADA alarms, substation and feeder switch status, feeder measurements, load voltage sensors, weather conditions, etc. Hence these techniques are not feasible in distribution systems because the measurements are not usually available at the substation and information about the operation of feeder protective devices is not normally known. Therefore most of the proposed techniques rely on the measurements of fundamental components of currents and voltages available at the substation. Using this information the distance to the fault is calculated. These techniques are so called “Model based techniques” or “Algorithmic techniques”. Most of these techniques do almost the same network modeling but differ in how to rank the multiple calculated fault locations. While some methods rely on experienced operators for frequently faulted sections in the network, some methods rely on more technical approaches such as software based fault indicators or methods of fault scenario matching followed by the estimations of load rejections due to fault. This paper presents a review of the most recent methods which use fundamental measurements of voltage and current taken in one terminal of the line, and applied to fault location on power distribution systems. The paper shows the fundamental mathematical background, emphasizing on the ma in advantages and disadvantages of each method. This review is the initial stage to propose hybrid fault location approaches, as a part of a project developed by both, Universidad Tecnologica de Pereira and the Universidad Industrial de Santander.