Detection of secondary arc extinction for adaptive single phase auto-reclosing based on local voltage behaviour

This study presents a non-communication based algorithm for detection of secondary arc extinction for adaptive single phase auto-reclosing of transmission lines. The algorithm is based on the behaviour pattern of the faulted phase voltage magnitude (VM) measured at the near end of the line. A prediction function is used to calculate the present VM few milliseconds in advance of its actual measurement. The difference between the actual and calculated values of the faulted phase VM is used as a criterion for detection of secondary arc extinction. A new method is proposed to analyse the arc extinction criterion which does not need a predefined threshold level. The algorithm uses low sampling frequency and is simple and fast. The algorithm can be applied on all transmission line configurations (transposed or untransposed) with different levels of reactive power compensation. The algorithm has been validated using the electromagnetic transient program software tool for simulation studies under many operational and fault cases. The presented test results for 465 cases verify the algorithm performance, which is not affected by the pre-fault line loading, the circuit breaker opening angle, arc type and fault location.