Traveling Wave Based Distribution Lines Fault Location Using Hilbert-Huang Transform

A new traveling wave based distribution line fault location method using Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is presented in this paper. The intrinsic mode function (IMF) components of the fault generated traveling wave are extracted by empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and the instantaneous frequency changing time of each IMF component is obtained through Hilbert transform. The traveling wave arrival time in global position system (GPS) can thus be detected according to its high frequency sudden change point which is extracted in the instantaneous frequency diagram. The HHT based fault location scheme is comparing with that based on wavelet transform. ATP simulation results show that the HHT method can more effectively extract the characteristics of traveling wave, and the fault location error is not more than plusmn150 m.