Novel Faulted Section Location Method for Distribution Network Based on Status Information of Fault Indicating Equipment

This paper proposes a novel faulted section location method for power distribution networks based on the status information collected by fault-indicating equipments. It has an advantage that it does not need to analyze and calculate any electrical parameters, and it is not affected by fault types and system parameters, so this method can be easily applied to power distribution networks. Firstly, a novel method for automatically constructing a line list is proposed in this paper—it can represent the topology structure of the power distribution line and the status information of fault-indicating equipment. Based on the line list, a topology search algorithm is proposed in the method to locate the faulted section. Considering that information loss will cause errors in the line list, an information loss detection algorithm is proposed to detect and correct the wrong status of fault-indicating equipments. Then, different fault conditions such as single fault, multiple faults, distributed generations in system and information loss condition are tested in power distribution networks with different topologies, and the simulation results indicate that the proposed method can deal with each case well. Moreover, the proposed fault location method has an advantage that the running time does not necessarily increase when the node scale is expanded.