Neural networks for fault location in substations

Faults producing load disconnections or emergency situations have to be located as soon as possible to start the electric network reconfiguration, restoring normal energy supply. This paper proposes the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs), of the associative memory type, to solve the fault location problem. The main idea is to store measurement sets representing the normal behavior of the protection system, considering the basic substation topology only, into associative memories. Afterwards, these memories are employed on-line for fault location using the protection system equipment status. The associative memories work correctly even in case of malfunction of the protection system and different pre-fault configurations. Although the ANNs are trained with single contingencies only, their generalization capability allows a good performance for multiple contingencies. The resultant fault location system is in operation at the 500 kV gas-insulated substation of the Itaipu system