An Intelligent Detection of High-Impedance Faults for Distribution Lines Integrated
With Distributed Generators
A BSTRACT
—The high-impedance faults (HIF) occurring on distribution lines go
undetected by the conventional relays due to their low current
magnitude. In addition to low current, HIFs also exhibit typical
characteristic features, such as randomness, nonlinearity, etc., which
are similar to the characteristics of the switching events, such as
harmonic load switching. The advent of distributed generators (DG)
into the distribution system, changes the current contribution through
the substation, which also affects the HIF detection. This paper
presents an intelligent HIF detection technique for distribution lines
incorporating the DGs.
I NTRODUCTION
T HE low-impedance short-circuit fault initiated on a distribution
feeder can be effortlessly identified using conventional overcurrent
relays. But, the high-impedance fault (HIF) is not identified by the
conventional overcurrent relays, because it draws low current and
behaves like an additional load by drawing extra current. In general,
the low-impedance faults (LIF) are detected within 0.5–2 cycles due
to the high magnitude of fault current, but in case of HIF due to its
indecisive nature, go unidentified for hours together until they are
visually inspected [1], [2]. Unidentified HIF may electrocute the
personal, which is a big threat to public safety. Also the emergency
services, such as traffic signals, hospitals, etc., get affected during
nuisance trippingDifferent schemes are available in the literature for
detecting HIF in distribution lines. In [3], a harmonic-based HIF
detection scheme is implemented for the IEEE 13-bus distribution
system. The protection scheme discussed in [4] uses wavelet energies
for HIF protection. In [5], an analytical formulation-based HIF
scheme is presented
Nawaz Ansari, Jayien Gautam, and Gaurav Kapoor
Modi Institute of Technology, Kota
M ETHODOLOGY
Any classifier or machine learning technique available in the
literature will be proficient enough in solving any classification
problem. Out of many available classifiers, an SVM is used in the
proposed study. An SVM is one of the standard and most significant
classifiers [25] used over the last decade in solving the relevant
problems in a power system. The real-time applicability of an SVM
is demonstrated in [26]. An SVM maps the original input space of
feature vectors into a separable higher dimensional space using dot
product. The generalizing capability of any classifier can be
maximized by recognizing the hyperplane with maximum
separability. This can be achieved by solving it as an optimization
problem. SVMs can solve both linear and nonlinear classification
problems.
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the proposed methodology
With these features as an input, the proposed methodology is
sorted into two stages, where stage 1 deals with detection of LIF,
whereas in stage 2, HIF is detected using an SVM
R ESULT & D ISCUSSION
Out of the total case studies, only 50% of the cases are used for
training and the rest are used for testing. The confusion matrix of
an SVM for 50% of the test cases is tabulated in Table II. It can be
seen that very few number of events mentioned in offdiagonal
elements of the confusion matrix are misclassified. The simulation
results are discussed below considering the presence of DGs and
HLs in the system.
In case of an HIF, the fault current is not adequate, and therefore,
the VMD–SVD value falls below the threshold set to detect the
LIF. If at all a lower threshold is set to identify the HIF Changes in
DG parameters vary the current contribution of DGs, which
decreases the power fed from the DG to load. Change in irradiance
of solar powered DG (DG-1) will reflect a dip in current from DG-
1. Similarly, power supplied through wind-based DG (DG-2) will
also get affected for variations in wind speed. This deficit power
gets compensated by the utility grid and also through diesel DG
C ONCLUSION
This paper presented an improved solution using VMD and SVM to
detect the HIFs by distinguishing them from SEs occurring on
distribution lines considering the presence of DGs. The proposed
methodology outperforms to discriminate the faults from different
SEs. The proposed methodology has been verified with replicate
real-time HIF by simulating it in MATLAB. From the test results, it
is evident that there is a clear discrimination between the faulty and
no-fault conditions .
R EFERENCES
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