Fault Location in Distribution Feeders with Optimally Placed PMU's

Instrumenting power networks with phasor measurement units (PMUs) facilitates several tasks including optimum power flow, system control, contingency analysis, fault detection etc. For the above purposes, PMU's are not required to place in all the bus in a power system. Also because of higher cost, optimal placement of PMU's are done by using the binary search algorithm. The algorithm for optimal placement is tested for a 7 bus and standard IEEE 14 & 30 bus systems. Once the PMU's are placed optimally, the next step involved is the fault location and diagnosis scheme which is capable of accurately identifying the location of a fault upon its occurrence. The proposed fault location method can be used to identify the fault in both ring and radial type distribution feeders. This scheme consists of three independent steps which are running parallel to obtain the exact location of the fault. The proposed algorithm is tested for eight different faults in an 11 bus radial test system and a 14 bus ring system.