Artificial neural network based load blinder for distance protection

Distance relay can provide remote backup protection by zone 2 and zone 3, but it may mal-operate under heavy loading conditions and cause cascading trips in the network, which could further lead to a wide spread blackout. To prevent cascading outages, load blinders are generally used to block distance relay when there is heavy load in the system. However, conventional load blinders are not always able to discriminate between heavy loading conditions and fault conditions, especially for heavy loads with low power factor or faults with fault resistance. This paper proposes a novel load blinder scheme for distance protection by using artificial neural network (ANN). Test results show that the proposed ANN-based load blinder scheme is able to discriminate between different heavy loads with a wide range of power factors and different faults with fault resistance.