A novel traveling wave arrival time detection method in power system

Abstract This paper proposes a high‐speed and accurate method for extracting the arrival times (ATs) of traveling waves (TWs) in the power system that can be used for fault location applications and transmission line protection. The proposed method is based on the expression of the traveling wave as the exponentially damped component superimposed on the sinusoidal wave in a small time window. Also the sine component is removed by using approximation and consecutive differences of the input signal samples (the modal components of three‐phase voltages or currents) from the resulting wave. Due to the fact that the estimation of traveling wave arrival times (TWATs) is done applying basic mathematical operations in the time domain, the proposed method, in addition to the simplicity of implementation, has the appropriate accuracy and speed for applications such as online fault location and protection purposes. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in fault locating, a 230 kV transmission line is modelled in EMTP/ATP. Then, the fault location under various conditions of faults such as changes in location and type of fault, fault conditions as well as variations in the measurement noise level and sampling frequency are studied using MATLAB.