Volume 8, Issue 6

Series compensation at the midpoint of a transmission line creates problems to conventional protection approaches. A new fault classification technique has been developed for a transmission line with a series capacitor at the midpoint, having different percentages of compensation varying from 25% to 75%. The proposed technique requires three line currents and voltages at each end and computes fundamental phasors of these quantities using a modified version of Full Cycle Discrete Fourier Transform. Using these phasors, the absolute values of three phase impedances are calculated for faulted phase identification. Moreover, the involvement of the ground in the fault is identified using a zero sequence component of the fault current. Using a PSCAD/EMTDC software package, a large test data (28,800) set has been generated with different types of faults and system variables, which includes fault resistances, fault inception angles, fault positions (before and after series capacitor) and variable loading conditions along with wide variations in the source impedances at both ends of a transmission line. The proposed scheme is tested on the said data set and the results are found to be promising. The results indicate that the proposed technique is fast, accurate and robust for a wide variation in system and fault conditions.

This paper describes a new iterative method to locate fault on a single transmission line. The method uses synchronized voltage and current measurements from both line terminals. Using the positive sequence components of the pre-fault and the post-fault phasors, positive sequence source impedances at both terminals are first estimated. Using these source impedances and the line data, the positive sequence bus impedance matrix (Zbus) is formed. Using the properties of Zbus, an iterative algorithm is proposed to locate the fault. This algorithm is tested extensively with data obtained from the EMTP simulation of a long transmission line simulated with distributed parameters in the presence of fault resistance and CT saturation. The simulation results show that the method is very accurate and robust.

For high-frequency (HF) interference in an HVDC converter station, the modeling of the noise source which causes interference with the power line carrier (PLC) remains a problem. Based on the profound analysis of the basic principles on which HF noise in PLC band is produced during the commutation process, the equivalent model of the HVDC valve with a snubber circuit is applied to the simulation of the GUI-GUANG HVDC project in PSCAD/EMTDC. Then spectrum plots of the noise source in the frequency domain are obtained by FFT analysis of the voltage waveforms gained from the simulation. Through analyzing the spectrum characteristics of the noise source in various operating modes, the main factors influencing the level of HF noise are found. Furthermore, a modified empirical model used to calculate the level of the noise source is introduced, with particular explanation of the physical quantities used in the model. The spectra of the noise source gained from the modified empirical model and from the simulation are compared with an actual spectrum based on the GUI-GUANG HVDC project. The results show that the modified empirical model can meet the requirement of HF interference calculation.

This paper presents an assessment of the vulnerability of the power grid to blackout using graph topological indexes. Based on a FERC 715 report and the outage reports, the cascading faults of summer WSCC 1996 are reconstructed, and the graphical property of the grid is compared between two cases: when the blackout triggering lines are removed simulating the actual sequence of cascading outages and when the same number of randomly selected lines are removed. The investigation finds that the critical path lengths of the triggering events of the July and August outages of 1996 WSCC blackout are higher than those of no-outage and arbitrary events. In addition, the small world-ness index for each of the outage triggering events is much smaller than that of normal or any no-outage scenario, indicating that events of shifting a network from small world to a random network would be more likely cascaded to wide area outage.