This paper presents new techniques for locating and diagnosing faults on electric power distribution feeders. The proposed fault location and diagnosis scheme is capable of accurately identifying the location of a fault upon its occurrence, based on the integration of information available from disturbance recording devices with knowledge contained in a distribution feeder database. The developed fault location and diagnosis system can also be applied to the investigation of temporary faults that may not result in a blown fuse. The proposed fault location algorithm is based on the steady-state analysis of the faulted distribution network. To deal with the uncertainties inherent in the system modeling and the phasor estimation, the fault location algorithm has been adapted to estimate fault regions based on probabilistic modeling and analysis. Since the distribution feeder is a radial network, multiple possibilities of fault locations could be computed with measurements available only at the substation. To identify the actual fault location, a fault diagnosis algorithm has been developed to prune down and rank the possible fault locations by integrating the available pieces of evidence. Testing of the developed fault location and diagnosis system using field data has demonstrated its potential for practical use

This work presents a digital fault location technique for rural distribution feeders, using the voltage and current data at a single location. Rural distribution feeders include single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase laterals off a main three-phase primary distribution feeder. The fault location scheme presented here attempts to account for the multiphase laterals, the unbalanced conditions, and the unsymmetrical nature of distribution feeders by continually updating voltage and current vectors at set locations within the system. The updated voltage and current vectors are the estimates of the 60-Hz phasor quantities obtained using a recursive optimal estimation algorithm. The distance to the fault is then estimated using a method based on the apparent impedance approach and the updated voltage and current vectors. Another consideration is the ability to determine the fault location on a lateral. A simulation of an actual rural distribution feeder using the Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP) is used to test the approach.

Past work on distribution circuit state estimation has focused on the adoption of a transmission state estimator approach, without necessarily accounting for the specific requirement of a distribution circuit-based analysis. On distribution circuits, typically, there are very few available real-time measurements, and thus, researchers have treated customer load demand estimates as pseudo-measurements in a weighted-least-squares formulation. This can lead to convergence problems and also, the approach effectively assumes that all bus load demands are normally distributed (Gaussian) which may not be valid on distribution circuits. This paper presents an alternative approach to distribution circuit state estimation using a probabilistic extension of the radial load flow algorithm while accounting for real-time measurements as solution constraint. The algorithm which takes advantage of the radial nature of distribution circuits also accounts for other issues specific to distribution circuits. Namely, the algorithm accounts for nonnormally distributed loads, incorporates the concept of load diversity (load correlation) and can interact with a load allocation routine. The effectiveness of the algorithm is illustrated through comparisons made with Monte Carlo simulations.

Reliable protection of distribution systems is becoming increasingly challenging with growing distributed energy resources (DERs) and microgrids. Existing adaptive overcurrent relaying (AOCR) schemes are vulnerable to DER ride-through and generally focus on only grid or islanded modes. This paper presents a dynamic AOCR scheme independent of external controllers to estimate relay pickup which ensures significantly less communication overhead. Existing and emerging challenges for the state-of-the-art are discussed and resolved using the proposed scheme. The reliability is tested using transient system models in Simulink for all combinations of state and fault types/impedances in a 15-bus distribution system.