A wavelet based approach for classification and location of faults in distribution systems

Electrical distribution system, which is the largest portion of networks, acts as a final power delivery path to the end users. Hence, ensuring its efficient and reliable operation is an extremely important and challenging task. Utilities, all over the world are competing for improvement in service to consumers, and the area of fault detection and diagnosis in distribution systems have attracted the significant attention of researchers in last few decades. With availability of inadequate system information and presence of high impedance faults, locating faults in a distribution system pose a major challenge to the utility operators. Most of the previous work on fault identification and location concentrated on estimating the status of circuit breakers and relays with aid of some algorithmic approaches. In this paper, a fault identification and location technique using wavelet multi-resolution approach for radial distribution systems are proposed. The current measurements at the substation, available in the distribution network have been utilized and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on 7-node and 19-node three-phase test systems.