Fault Location Based on Voltage Measurement at Secondary Side of Low-Voltage Transformer in Distribution Network

This article introduces a fault location method based on the voltage measurement at the secondary side of low-voltage transformer in distribution networks. It can be divided into fault section location and fault distance estimation. The first step for fault section location, the measured voltage with different positions is grouped to distinguish the upstream and downstream of the fault by the nearest neighbor clustering algorithm. And the second step is fault distance estimation. The voltage amplitude of the smart meter in the downstream side of the fault, the voltage, and current of the substation are used to estimate fault distance via an iteration search in the estimated fault section. Simulation results are presented in different scenarios in the IEEE 34 Bus and 134 Bus test network. Various issues such as fault resistance, fault type, measurement errors, DG, and the neutral grounding mode are investigated in simulations. The simulation results confirm the performance of the proposed method for fault location.