Monitoring, protection and fault location in power distribution networks using system-wide measurements

Thanks to cost reductions and improvement of information and communication technologies, future distribution networks will probably have advanced communication infrastructures and more measurement devices installed in order to manage the increasing complexity of those networks, which is primarily caused by the introduction of distributed generation at the distribution level.

Therefore this thesis investigates how the monitoring, protection and fault location functions can be improved by using system-wide measurements, i.e. real-time measurements such as synchronized voltage and current measurements recorded at different network locations. Distributed synchronized measurements bring new perspectives for these three functions: protection and fault location are usually performed with local measurements only and synchronized measurements are not common in monitoring applications. For instance, by measuring distributed generators infeed together with some feeder measurements, the protection is expected to be more sensitive and selective and the fault location to be more accurate.

The main contribution of this work is the use of state estimation, which is normally only used for network monitoring, for the protection and the fault location.

The distribution system state estimation is first developed using the classical transmission system approach. The impact of the placement of the measurement devices and of a relatively low measurement redundancy on the accuracy, on the bad data detection and on the topology error identification capabilities of the estimator are discussed and illustrated. This results in recommendations on the placement of the meters.

Then, a backup protection algorithm using system-wide measurements is presented. The coherence of the measurements and the healthy network model are checked thanks to a linear three-phase state estimation. If the model does not fit to the measurements and if the estimated load is too high or unbalanced, a fault is detected. The advantages of the method are that the voltage measurement redundancy is considered, improving the detection sensitivity, and that load models may be considered in the algorithm, avoiding the need to install measurement devices on every line of the network.

Finally, two new impedance-based fault location algorithms using distributed voltage and current recordings are proposed. By defining statistical errors on the measurements and the network parameters, a method to compute a confidence interval of the fault distance estimate is proposed. The fault location accuracy and its sensitivity to the fault conditions (e.g. fault resistance or fault type) and to the different sources of error are assessed on a simulated distribution system.