Real-Time Wide-Area Fault Locator for Power Transmission Networks Using Sparse PMU Measurements

This paper proposes a real-time fault location strategy using complex voltage data from sparse phasor measurement units (PMU) and the network topology. The strategy uses a least-squares based approach and modified breadth first search algorithm to locate buses closest to the fault. This strategy serves as the crucial first step towards wide-area measurement, protection and control schemes which use faster-than-real-time dynamics simulations to predict and avoid cascading failures. The proposed approach has been tested extensively on two transmission system models: a 23 bus case and a 200 bus case, for bus faults and line faults. The fault locator has shown to be sufficiently accurate in determining the bus closest to the fault without having to carry out any computationally expensive calculations. The algorithm also scales well to large systems and performs accurately with measurement noise.