SKM Power*Tools for Windows

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Con Edison experiences more than 1000 arcing faults on its secondary distribution system each year. Arcing faults introduce strong harmonics into the power network. We propose a fast, low cost, and high performance approach to locating arcing faults based on harmonics. First, we implemented 2 novel algorithms. One is based on voltage ratio of harmonics. This method can detect arcing fault one at a time. The second one is based on sparse sensing, which is a powerful technique that can detect multiple faults and is robust to measurement noise. Both methods require low cost voltage measurements; no high cost sensors are required. In addition, the computations can be done very quickly within a few cycles (<50ms). Second, we have performed extensive simulation studies using IEEE 14-bus system, IEEE 18-bus system, IEEE 118-bus system, and a 454-bus system. We only need to measure the voltages of a small percentage of the nodes. For example, voltages from only 20% of the nodes in a 454-bus system are needed for accurate fault location. Multiple simultaneous faults can be located. All the results clearly demonstrated the location accuracy of our algorithms.

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