2016 International Conference on Electrical Power and Energy Systems (ICEPES)
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India. Dec 14-16, 2016
High Impedance Fault Detection in Microgrid
Using Maximal Overlapping Discrete Wavelet
Transform and Decision Tree
Susmita Kar, Student Member, IEEE
School of Electrical Sciences
IIT Bhubaneswar, India
Email-Susmita.bit@gmail.com
Abstract— The paper presents a high impedance fault (HIF)
detection scheme for microgrid using maximal overlapping
discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) and decision tree (DT).
The small, nonlinear, random and widely varying fault current of
HIF makes the over-current relay insensitive. Thus, time-
frequency information is required to distinguish HIF from no-
fault event. The proposed work start with retrieving the fault
current which is pre-process through (decompose using)
MODWT to get the details and approximation coefficient.
Further, some statistical features are estimated using the details
and approximation coefficient. The features extracted are used to
train decision tree (DT) for accurate classification of HIF from
no-fault. The proposed scheme is tested for HIFs detection in
microgrid for different operating conditions. The test results
show that the proposed scheme provides an effective protection
measure against HIFs for safe and secured operation of
microgrid.
Index Terms — Microgrid, High impedance fault, Maximal
overlapping discrete wavelet transform, Decision Tree.
I. INTRODUCTION
Integration of distributed generations (DGs) with enabling the
use of renewable energy sources changes the conventional
distribution system into a microgrid. Microgrid provides on-
site generation which reduces distribution losses. The use of
renewable energy sources such as wind energy, photo-voltaic
cells and fuel cells, provides solution to the problems of
greenhouse gas emission and depletion of fossil fuel based
energy[1-2]. Microgrid can operate in grid connected mode
(connected with the main utility) or in islanded mode
(independently) while meeting the service reliability and
power quality [3]. However, to experience the benefits, an
effective microgrid protection scheme is highly essential [1-4].
The protection issue becomes critical in microgrid as the
magnitude and direction of fault current varies with the
operating modes [4]. Thus, the protection scheme must be
sensitive to changes happens in microgrid and ensure safe
operation of microgrid against all types of faults in grid
connected and islanded mode. Several microgrid protection
techniques have been proposed [5-10].
978-1-5090-2476-6/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
S. R. Samantaray, Senior Member, IEEE
School of Electrical Sciences
IIT Bhubaneswar, India
Email-sbh_samant@yahoo.co.in
An adaptive relaying strategy for microgrid protection with
high penetration of DGs is proposed in [5] which does not
consider islanded mode of operation. A communication based
protection schemes for grid connected microgrids with an
assumption of large amount of fault current contributed from
utility grid is proposed in [6], [7]. The authors in [8] derived
sequence components to design the protection relay. However,
multiple settings are applied on the derived sequence
components, making the relaying scheme more complex. The
voltage based protection scheme is proposed in [9] which uses
synchronous reference frame to compare the reference of the
phase voltage at the DG source. Data-mining model based
protection scheme for shunt faults is proposed in [10-11],
which work efficiently in both grid connected and islanded
mode. It is observed that the above referenced works are
suitable for solid and low impedance faults and fails to detect
high impedance faults (HIFs). However, HIF mostly occurs in
distribution networks when the overhead conductor comes in
electrical contact with the high-impedance surface like
concrete or tree [12].
A differential energy based microgrid protection scheme is
proposed in [3] which considered both shunt faults and HIFs
for their study. However, the same scheme does not provide
clear idea on HIF detection at different operating modes.
Further, the scheme suffers from the high computational
burden of the S-transform in computing differential energy,
leading to slower response time of 4 cycles from the fault
inception. The aforementioned protection issues provide a
strong motivation for developing a HIF detection scheme in
microgrid.
The HIF does not cause an excessive change in fault current
due to the high impedance path and thus, the overcurrent relay
fails to provide protection against HIFs. Further, the fault
current in HIF is non-linear, random and widely varying in
nature [12-14]. Thus, the proposed scheme utilize both time
and frequency information for HIF detection in microgrid. The
proposed scheme develops a HIF detection scheme for
microgrid using MODWT and decision tree. The scheme
considered HIF at various locations of the distribution lines
with grid connected and islanded mode of microgrid. Further,
258
some no-fault cases such as sudden load change, capacitors R1 =0.413 ohms/km, L0 =1.05 e-3 H/km, L1 =3.32 e-3
switching etc. are considered at different operating conditions. H/km, C0 =11.33 e-9 F/km, X1 =5.01 e-9 F/km,
The proposed scheme retrieves the fault (HIF) currents and x Total loading (sum of L1 to L5) considered : 20MW,
pre-processes (decomposes) it through MODWT-preprocessor 10MVAR.
[15], [16] to obtain the details and approximation coefficient.
Some statistical features such as mean, standard deviation, PCC
B-1 TR -2 DG -1
B-2
energy and entropy are estimated using the details and
approximation coefficients for each phase. The features TR -1 CB-1 DL -1 CB-2
estimated are used to build the decision tree (DT) for HIF and CB_MAIN
B-3
CB-3 DL -2 CB-4
no-fault classification. Fig. 1 shows the schematic diagram of L-2 B-4
TR -3 DG -2
UTILITY
the proposed HIF detection scheme for microgrid.
HIF
CB-5 DL -3 CB-6
IFault L-1 B-5

CB-7 DL -4 CB-8 L-4

L-3

Pre-process using
TR -4 L-5
MODWT

DG -3

Features Final relaying

Extraction DT Decision Fig.2. Studied microgrid
(HIF Detection)

Fig.1. Proposed intelligent HIF protection scheme. III. DESIGN OF PROPOSED RELAYING SCHEME FOR HIF
DETECTION

II. SYSTEM STUDIED A. MODWT and Features Extraction

The test microgrid system for the proposed HIF detection
scheme is shown in Fig. 2. The base power has been chosen as
10 MVA. The details of the test system are given as follows:
x Utility: rated short-circuit MVA=1000, f=60 Hz, rated kV
=120, Vbase = 120 kV.
x Distributed Generations (DGs):
¾ DG1, DG3: synchronous generator with rated MW=9,
f=60Hz, rated kV=2.4, Inertia constant H=1.07sec.,
Rs=0.0036pu, Xd=1.56 pu, Xd'=0.296 pu, Xd"=
0.177pu, Xq=1.06pu, Xq"=0.177pu, Xl=0.052pu,
Td'=3.7sec, Td"=0.05sec, Tqo"=0.05 sec.
¾ DG2: Wind farm consisting of three 2 MW wind
turbines (6 MW), f=60Hz, rated kV=575V, Inertia
constant H=0.62sec.,Rs=0.006pu, Xd=1.305 pu, Xd'=
0.296 pu, Xd''= 0.252pu, Xq=0.474pu, Xq"=0.243pu,
Xl=0.18pu, Tdo'=4.49sec,Tdo"= 0.0681sec,
Tq"=0.0513sec. 575V, 60Hz. The synchronous
generator with inverter interface to main grid has been
considered for the proposed study (Type- 4 detailed
model in MATLAB/SIMULINK).
x Transformer (TRs):
¾ TR1: rated MVA = 15, f = 60 Hz, rated kV = 120/25,
Vbase = 25 kV, R1 = 0.00375 pu, X1= 0.1 pu, Rm= 500
pu, Xm= 500 pu.
¾ TR2, TR4: rated MVA = 12, f = 60 Hz, rated kV =
2.4kV/ 25 kV, Vbase = 25 kV.
¾ TR3: rated MVA = 2.5, f = 60 Hz, rated kV = 575 V/
25 kV, Vbase = 25 kV.
x Distribution lines (DL) : DL1, DL2, DL3, and DL4 : PI-
Section, 20km each, Vbase = 25 kV, R0 =0.1153 ohms/km,
The wavelet transform is a powerful tool for the analysis
of non-stationary signals like fault current, where frequency
content varies with time [15]. Wavelet transform is a better
tool as compared to Fourier transform and STFT, providing
both time and frequency information which is required to
extract transient information from the non-stationary signals
[3].
The wavelet transform represents the signal in time–
frequency domain and provides the time localization of the
signal [14-17], whereas Fourier transform does not give any
information related to time–frequency domain. Further, the
Short time Fourier transform (STFT) has limitation in
resolution due to its fixed window size. The wavelet transform
(discrete) provides uniform time resolution for all frequencies,
high time resolution and low frequency resolution for high
frequencies and high frequency resolution and low time
resolution for low frequencies. [15] The practical application
of wavelet transform is performed using the discrete wavelet
transform (DWT) [15].
However, DWT is limited to the signal length of N which
is multiple of 2 j where j = 1, 2, 3, . . , J (J is the scale number)
[15]. Further, the orthogonal transform of DWT suffers the
lack of the invariance translation in time series analysis.
Whereas, the maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform
(MODWT) is the enhanced version of the DWT with ability of
the free selection of a starting point of a time series signal
[15]. The MODWT is a non-orthogonal variant of the classical
DWT. The MODWT scaling filter hil and the wavelet filter gil
are related to the DWT filter through (1) and (2).

259
 hl j

hil (1) i  i
2
X (n ) ¦ D j A j (13)
l 0

gl The original signal can be reconstructed easily from the

gil (2) decomposed signals like DWT techniques (using the obtained
2
details and approximation). In the present application the post
The MODWT filters are also in the quadrature mirrors like fault (HIF) current signal is retrieved and pre-processed
DWT filter is given as (4) and (3)
(decomposed to get details and approximate coefficients) to
i
g (  1) l  1 h L  1  l (3) find out the statistical features such as mean, standard
deviation, energy and entropy of the detailed and approximate
h (  1) l  1 g L  1  l (4)
coefficients at each decomposition level. The energy of detail
where l = 0, 1, 2, . . . , L − 1 and L is the width of the filter. coefficients at each decomposition level ED,i is obtained as
The nth element of the first-stage wavelet and the scaling follows:
coefficients of MODWT with the input time series signal Y (n) N 2
1
is as follows:
L1  1
E D ,i
N
¦ D ij (14)
j 1
i hil Y n  l m o d N
W 1,n ¦ (5) The standard deviation of detail coefficients at each
l 0
decomposition level STDD,i is obtained as follows:
L1  1
1
Vi 1 , n ¦ gil Y n  l m o d N (6) § 1 N
·2
l 0 S T D D ,i ¨ ¦ ( D ij  P i ) 2 ¸ (15)
Where n= 1, 2, 3,..., N and N is the length of signal in sample. © N j 1 ¹
L1  1
The entropy of detail coefficients at each decomposition level
iA 1 , n gil Vi 1 , n  l m o d N
¦ (7) EntD,i is obtained as follows:
l 0 N
L1  1 E n t D ,i  ¦ D ij2 lo g ( D ij2 ) (16)
i 1,n hil W
i
D ¦ 1,n  l m o d N (8) j 1
l 0
The total energy ETOTAL is obtained as follows:
The first-stage approximations and details can be calculated N 2
2

by (7) and (8). The MODWT scaling coefficients Vij and W

j
j
E TOTAL ¦ A ij  ¦¦ D ij (17)
i j 1 i
wavelet coefficients at the nth element of the jth stage are
Where i =1, 2, 3,..., l (level of decomposition, in this
given by the eqns. (9) and (10)
application 4) and N is the number of samples in each
L j 1
decomposed data.
Vi j ,n ¦ gi j ,1
Yi n  l m o d N (9) In the present application, one cycle post HIF current signal
l 0 samples are retrieved and pre-processed through MODWT to
L j 1
obtained the details and approximate coefficients at different
i h Yi n  l m o d N
W j ,n ¦ j ,1
(10) decomposition level. The different statistical features such as
l 0 mean, standard deviation, energy and entropy are estimated
for the details and approximate coefficients. Further, the
Similarly, the approximations j j of the
A j and the details D j
features estimated are used to build the DT for HIF and no-
nth element of the jth stage MODWT are given by the (11) and fault classification. Fig. 3(a) and (b) shows the fault current
(12). and the detail coefficients at different decomposition level,
L j 1 respectively.
0
i gi Vi 1 , n  l m o d N In the proposed study, 12 features are derived from the
A j ,n ¦ j ,l
(11)
current signal (post HIF) retrieved at each phase. The
l 0

L j 1 complete features set consider in this work are as follows:

i h
0
i F1=Sum of Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
D j ,n ¦ j ,l
W 1, n  l m o d N (12)
each decomposition level for phase a
l 0
0 0
F2= Sum of standard deviation obtained for detailed
Where gi l is periodized gi to length N and also the h l is coefficients at each decomposition level for phase a
F3= Sum of Entropy obtained for detailed coefficients at
periodized h to length N. So the original time series signal each decomposition level for phase a
can be stated in terms of the approximations and the details as F4= Total Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
follows: each decomposition level and final approximation for
phase a

260
 F5=Sum of Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level for phase b
F6= Sum of standard deviation obtained for detailed
coefficients at each decomposition level for phase b
F7= Sum of Entropy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level for phase b
F8= Total Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level and final approximation for
phase b.
F9=Sum of Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level for phase c
F10= Sum of standard deviation obtained for detailed
coefficients at each decomposition level for phase c
F11= Sum of Entropy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level for phase c
F12= Total Energy obtained for detailed coefficients at
each decomposition level and final approximation for
phase c
Current amplitute (in pu)
the decision tree for HIF classification. The proposed work
simulates the HIF and no-fault cases at different location of
the distribution feeder at various operating conditions (grid
connected and islanded).
DT [18] being rule-based, is more transparent and human
friendly. Thus, it is a popular classification and decision
making tool for high dimensional data spaces [18]. The
proposed work uses the powerful open-source data mining
software package ‘R’ for generating the DT [18-21]. Training
of the DT starts with estimation of the statistical features for
the particular kth instance. Initially, all the 12 statistical
features are set as input against one target output of 1 (for
HIF) and 0 (for no-fault situation) for a particular kth instant.
The feature set at kth instant is passed through the DT and the
process continues till convergence. The proposed work
considered 1493 (973 HIF and 520 no-fault) cases. Out of
1493 cases, 70% data of the feature space is used for training
of the DT, whereas the rest 30% data is used for testing.
Further, performance assessment is carried out.
The training feature set includes 1045 generated cases (685

0.2
numbers of HIF cases and 360 numbers of no fault cases). The
0.1
DT generated for HIF and no-fault classification is shown in
0
Fig. 4. It is observed that, though 12 features are used to train
-0.1
the DT only 5 features such as F1, F5, F8, F9 and F12 are
-0.2
participating in the classification process. While testing the
0 50 100 150 200 250
Samples
trained DT using the rest 30% data (448 cases), it is found
Fig. 3(a) classification accuracy of 99.77%. Out of 448 data count
(testing data set), 01 case is misclassified (1 no-fault case
0.2 classified as HIF).
0
-0.2
0 50 100 150 200 250
F1 >= 6.28
Current amplitute (in pu)

0.02
0 s No
-0.02 Ye
0 50 100 150 200 250 F5 >= 5.5 HIF
0.05

0 Yes No

-0.05
0 50 100 150 200 250
F9 < 5.3 F8 >= 6.31
0.1
s No No
Ye s
0 Ye
-0.1 No Fault F12 >= 6.29 HIF
0 50 100 150 200 250
No Fault
0.1 s No
Ye
0
-0.1 No Fault HIF
0 50 100 150 200 250
Samples
Fig. 3(b) Fig. 4. DT generated for HIF and no-fault classification.
Fig.3(a). Fault current and Fig. 3(b) the detail coefficients at different
decomposition level.
IV. RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
B. Building DT for HIF and no-fault classification Performance assessment of the proposed HIF detection
scheme is carried out using the following reliability measures
The instantaneous one cycle post HIF current signals are [18].
retrieved using CT and then pre-processed through MODWT x Dependability: It is defined as the ratio between
(decompose the main signal into details and approximation total number of HIF cases predicted and total number
coefficient). Some statistical features like energy, mean, of actual HIF cases.
standard deviation and entropy are estimated using the details
and approximation coefficient. These features are used to train

261
 x Security: It is defined as the ratio between total
number of no-fault cases predicted and total number
of actual no-fault cases.
x Accuracy: It is defined as the ratio between total
number of correctly predicted (HIF + no-fault) cases
and total numbers of actual (HIF + no-fault) cases.
Dependability shows the selectivity of the relaying scheme
whereas security shows the false-alarm which indicates the
number no-fault cases predicted as fault (HIF) [18]. However,
mis-detection is most critical compared to the false-alarm for
fault protection relay. The fault current magnitude varies
significantly with the operating conditions of microgrid [18].
Thus, to show the efficacy of the proposed HIF detection
scheme performance assessment is carried out separately for
grid-connected mode and islanded mode. This uses another
data set of 891 cases (449 cases in grid connected mode (326
HIF and 123 no-fault) and 441 cases in islanded mode (328
HIF and 113 no-fault)).
The performance test results at grid connected mode are
shown in Fig. 5. This test includes 326 HIF cases and 123 no-
fault cases. It is observed that the proposed HIF detection
scheme has classification accuracy of 100% (with
dependability 100% and security 100 % in grid-connected
mode. Thus, the proposed scheme is able to classify all cases
correctly in grid connected mode. While, performance
assessment is carried out in islanded mode, it is observed that,
the proposed HIF detection scheme has classification accuracy
of 99.32% with dependability 100% and security 98.23 % is
shown in Fig. 6. This shows the potential ability of the
proposed scheme for HIF classification in different operating
mode.
100.5
Grid connected mode
Islanded mode
100 99.8%
99.6%
99.5 99.35%
99.02%
Percentage
99
98.5 98.24%
98
97.5
97
Dependability Security
Fig.5. Performance of DT for fault detection in grid connected and islanded
mode.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The proposed scheme develops a HIF detection scheme is
for microgrid using MODWT and decision tree. The statistical
features derived from the details and approximation
coefficients (obtained on decomposition through MODWT)
are used to build the DT for HIF and no-fault classification.
The proposed scheme provides high classification accuracy of
more than 99% with dependability 100% at different modes.
The high value reliability measures make the scheme suitable
candidate for HIF detection in microgrid.
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