Development of automated fault isolation system on distribution systems in Malaysia

This automated fault isolation system (AFIS) was developed and integrated into distribution automation system (DAS) based on hardware and software systems. To implement AFIS, a customer substation has been physically fabricated and automated which represented the low voltage customer substation system of 415/240V. Like many other distribution utilities in the world, TNB distribution system did have automation system at that time, so in order to implement automation system; it is needed to modify the existing distribution configuration. This is done so to replicate the Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) distribution system and modify this system to suit distribution automation system operation mechanism. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) along power line communication (PLC) system have been used for monitoring and operating the distribution system. TNB distribution system is based on an open loop distribution system for that reason the open loop distribution system has been adopted to implement the actual distribution configuration system. This research is the first DAS research work done on customer based substation for operating and controlling between the consumer side system and the substation at the TNB side in automated manner. This paper presents all the basic elements of the developed distribution automation system and its main components. Hardware parts, software parts, techniques used to integrate different portions of the developed system are presented and discussed. Complete automated fault isolation results are presented and discussed in this paper.