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ANN Based Fault Location in Electrical Distribution System

Zahra Moravej
zmoravej@semnan.ac.ir

Mohsen Niasati
mniasati@semnan.ac.ir

Seyed Hamid Mortazavi


Shmy58@gmail.com

Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran for transmission systems because of their simple topologies, but for distribution systems, there are a lot of load taps and discontinuities and lateral feeders in a main line that will reflect a traveling wave, which makes it difficult to apply traveling wave based methods to distribution systems [2]. In fundamental frequency component or impedance based methods, the fault types and faulted phases are identified first. Then, the apparent impedance is calculated based on the selected voltage and selected current. These methods have been used since decades ago and have been discussed in many research papers and technical reports. There are also commercial fault locators based on impedance methods [2]. For fault location in the distribution system, load currents at different taps are sources of error. Voltage regulator and nonhomogenous line in distribution system also can produce error in fault location as there is nonlinear relation between the impedance measured at substation and the distance to fault. In such case artificial neural networks (ANN) can be very helpful. ANNs can be used to model very complex systems and map the nonlinear function with good accuracy if they trained well. The ANNs are very different from expert systems since they do not need a knowledge base to work. Instead, they have to be trained with numerous cases. Following this introduction, in section II ANN based fault location is discussed and the distribution test system and simulation of this system are presented. Finally in section IV, the results of fault location for different faults in the test distribution system are presented. The simulation of the system was done in Simulink [13] and ANNs are created and trained by employing Neural Network Toolbox in MATLAB [14] environment. II. ANN BASED FAULT LOCATION

AbstractAn Artificial Neural Network based fault location algorithm for distribution feeders is presented in this paper. The principle of algorithm is quite simple and it use only phasor of voltage and current measured at the substation, but it can estimate the location of fault with very good resolution. First phasor of voltage and current will be calculated and then according the type of fault, the trained ANN estimates the fault location. According to the different types of fault, 3 different ANNs will be used for fault location estimation. The simulations were done on IEEE 34 feeder test system and the results show that ANNs can estimate the fault location with a good resolution for a wide range of fault resistance. Keywords-Power Distribution Artificial Neural Network; Phasor System; Fault Location;

I.

INT RODUCTION

Fault location in distribution medium-voltage (MV) networks has been a subject of interest to utility engineers and researchers [1]-[12]. Information on accurate fault location available just after the fault, helps utility personnel to expedite service restoration and to make adequate reconfiguration of the network for reducing outage time and operating costs. Therefore, more efficient methods for fault location, supply restoration and high-quality customer service, are highly required. In such a case, the fault location algorithm is a numerical procedure that converts voltage and current, given in a digital form, into a single number being a distance to fault [1]. There are many fault location techniques that were discussed in research papers such as [2]: Fundamental frequency component based methods that find the fault location by calculating the apparent impedance [3]-[6]. High frequency components and traveling wave based methods that locate faults based on a fault generating high frequency signals [7]-[8]. Artificial intelligence and statistical analysis based methods such as expert systems, neural networks, etc., that provide a way to capture the experience of operators or engineers [9]-[12].

Artificial neural networks are widely used in electrical engineering for prediction, estimation, modeling, control, signal processing, pattern recognition etc. One of the important properties of ANN is the ability to learn with or without a teacher. This ability makes us to model complex system that cannot be simply modeled mathematically [1]. An ANN is a set of elementary neurons that are connected together in different architectures organized in layers. Each layer is composed of numbers of neurons that are connected to the previous layer neurons outputs. Inputs of an ANN or

Traveling wave based methods have high accuracy and their accuracy does not rely on system condition. They are used

excitation signals are delivered to the neurons of input layer. A weight is attached to each neuron and the training enables adjusting of different weights according to the training set. The ANN are not programmed or supported by a knowledge base as are expert systems. Instead, they learn a response based on given inputs and a required output by adjusting the node weights and biases accordingly. A major problem with ANNs is that no exact guide exists for the choice of the number of hidden layers and neurons per hidden layer. On the other hand, the ability to generalize is one of the main advantages of using ANNs. ANN is designed to generalize the observed inputs and will produce a correct inputoutput mapping even when the input was not presented to the network in the learning process [1]. Hence we can train an ANN with proper input-output data for fault location that obtained from simulation and hope that the trained network can estimate location of faults for tarring dataset as well as for cases that not used for training. There are variety in the kind of ANN and training algorithm that are described in many books & papers as [14] - [16]. For our problem to fault location in distribution system, we employed a multilayer perceptron (MLP) feed-forward neural network with one input layer with nine neurons, one hidden layer and one output neuron. Input neurons include 3 phase voltage phasor magnitude, 3 phase current phasor magnitude and the phase between the phasor of voltage and current. The output of network is estimated reactance between the measurement point and fault location. Number of neurons in hidden layer is different for networks and obtained by trial and error to achieve the minimum error. The activation function for the hidden layer and output layer was selected tangent sigmoid function (tansig) and linear function (purelin) orderly[14]. For training the neural network so it can estimate the fault reactance, we simulated all type of fault with different ground fault resistance. The LevenbergMarquardt (LM) Method was selected for training networks. LM learning method is second-order error minimization methods in which the gradient descent concept is extended to include the second derivative of the error surface [15].

As different ANNs are used for different types of faults, first the type of fault must be distinguished. The voltage & current are continuously measured at the feeder in the substation (node 800 in figure 1) and these analogue values are converted to digital signals by using an A/D convertor with sampling rate equal to 10 kHz. The digital data are transferred to a computer at the substation where they are stored and will be processed. After pre-processing digital signals (if required) the first step of algorithm is phasor estimation of three phase voltage and current. After obtaining the phasors of voltage and current, the magnitude of currents for three phases will compare to the setting values. The settings were set according to maximum load current of for each phase. After comparing the current phasor of each phase, the type of fault is known (if there is a fault). According to the type of fault the proper trained ANN will be used for estimation the reactance to fault and the input of the network will be prepared. Inputs for all of the networks are phasor magnitude of current and voltage and the difference phase between voltage and current for each phase. Figure 1 shows the overall fault location system based on ANN.

The initial weights are set randomly and they will be updated in every epoch according to error function for the whole set of training.
Implementing one network for all types of faults will reduce the accuracy of the algorithm considerably; hence according to the type of faults we organized 3 networks for the fault reactance estimation: ANN-1: for single phase-ground faults, i.e. a-g, b-g and c-g faults. ANN-2: for two phase and two phase-ground faults; i.e. ab, b-c, a-c, a-b-g, b-c-g and a-c-g faults. ANN-3: for three phase short circuits.
Figure 1. Overall diagram of ANN based fault location system

III.

DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM MODEL

For investigation and testing the ANN based fault location algorithm, IEEE 34 node test feeder was used. Single line diagram of this system is shown in figure 2 and types of overhead line configurations of this system are listed in table I [17]. This system is an actual feeder located in Arizona. The feeders nominal voltage is 24.9 kV. It is characterized by [18]: 1. Very long and lightly loaded 2. Two in-line regulators maintain a good voltage profile 3. An in-line transformer reducing the voltage to 4.16 kV for a short section of the feeder (a 500 kVA transformer at node 832). 4. Unbalanced loading with both spot and distributed loads. 5. Shunt capacitors There are single phase (phase a or b) and three phases lateral feeders in this system. There is a 2500 kVA, 69/24.9 kV distribution transformer at substation (node 800) that is not illustrated in figure but considered in our simulation. Table I shows the configuration of lines of system. The details about the system can be found in [17]. The system was simulated in MATLAB Simulink with some changes compare to original system as follow: Voltage regulators are simulated by 3 single phase transformer, the primary and secondary voltage of transformers were set according to load flow results [2]. All loads were simulated as PQ loads.
848 822 820 818 802 806 808 812 814 850 816 800 810 852 828 830 854 856 824 826 858 832 888 890 838 864 846 844 842 834 860 836 862 840

Distributed loads were modeled by two lumped loads at the half of line segment and at the end of line such that sum of these two loads resulted in total sum of the distributed load. As this system is an actual system with non-homogeneity and unbalance loads that has lateral feeders, two inline voltage regulators, shunt capacitors and a distribution transformer, it seems it is a good choice for testing the algorithm for fault location in distribution system. IV. TRAINING ANNS FOR FAULT LOCATION

Training is the most important part in the ANN based algorithms. The training of networks for fault location is supervised which means for each input, the corresponding output is also presented to the network. The proper inputoutput data that can cover a wide range of contingencies must be prepared for training and the training parameters must select in such a way that outputs of the ANN be as equal as possible to the desired outputs for the training data set and the network produces minimum error for the inputs that has not been used in training procedure. As mentioned in section II, three ANNs have been used for locating different types of faults. Each network must be trained separately and its parameter be tuned without any relation to other networks. For each type fault (ten types of fault as described in section II) the simulated system have been run for the fault location in all line sections of system and for the ground fault, the ground resistance were set Rg=0,1,5,8,10,60 and 100 ohm. After each run the voltage, current and the location of fault in system were recorded. After simulations, the discrete values of current and voltage were be used to calculate the phasors of current and voltage. To estimate the phasors, we employed the three-parameter least squares fit to sinewave data as described in Annex A of IEEE standard 1057 [19]. This algorithm provides a least squares method for fitting digitized waveform data to a sinewave where the frequency of the sinewave is known. After calculation of phasors, according to the point of fault, the reactance from the measuring point (node 800 in figure 1) was calculated and input-output data set for training networks was prepared. Three phase voltage and current phasor magnitude and the phase difference between voltage and current magnitude have been used as inputs for all of the networks and the reactance between the measuring point and the point of fault have been selected as the networks output. The networks were trained with LevenbergMarquardt method that introduced minimum error among the other training methods available in the neural network toolbox. The numbers of neurons in the hidden layer were select by trial and error for minimizing error. In fact each network was trained with the prepared training data set after the training was completed, all of the inputs of training set for each network were fed to the network and the output of network were be compared to the desired outputs and the average of absolute percentage error for the whole set, was recorded. The absolute percentage error (APE) for the ANN fault locator can be written as:

Figure 2. Single line diagram of IEEE 34 node test feeder

TABLE I. Configuration 300 301 302 303 304

LINE CONFIGURATIONS OF IEEE TEST FEEDER Phasing BACN BACN AN BN BN Phase ACSR 1/0 #2 6/1 #4 6/1 #4 6/1 #2 6/1 Neutral ACSR 1/0 #2 6/1 #4 6/1 #4 6/1 #2 6/1 Spacing ID 500 500 510 510 510

APE % Desired Output - ANN Output*100 Desired Output Then by changing the number of neurons in hidden layer the whole process of training and testing were repeated. The number of neurons changed between 9 and 50 and by comparing the results, the number that introduced ted minimum error was selected. Table II shows the selected number of neurons for each network. It must be mentioned that the optimum number of neurons depends on the initial weight and the training parameters. In fact as the initial weights are set randomly, according to these initial weights, the final performance of the network may vary if the initial weights vary according to the LevenbergMarquardt algorithm stopping criteria for training. The activation functions for the two layers also were selected in same way and the tansig and purelin were selected as hidden layer and output layer activation function for all of the networks. We simulate 10 different types of fault at the 0.5 length of and at the end each line section (except for the lines that are less than 100 meters long). It must be considered that 7 of line sections are single phase (phase a or b) and 3 of line sections have less than 100 meters length. Figure 3 shows the actual and estimated reactance for single phase to ground fault in all line section of simulated system when the Rg is equal to 0 ohm. Numbers in the x-axis of plot stand for the simulation state according to the items in table III for a-g faults. For example state 6 means that the fault is in the middle of line segment between node 808 and 812 according to the figure 2. The large values of reactance at the state 51 and 52 in figure 3, belong to the reactance of line section between node 888 and 890 (in figure 2) that are transferred to 24.9kV side of in-line transformer.
TABLE II. SELECTED PARAMETERS FOR ANN FAULT LOCATORS Fault locator Fault Type No. of Neurons in Hidden Layer Minimum performance gradient Performance goal Performance Function Maximum number of epochs to train ANN-1
ph-g 37

TABLE III. State No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52


First Node

SIMULATION STATES FOR A-G FAULTS Length Location of Configuration (ft.) Fault 2580 300 End of Line Middle of Line 1730 300 End of Line Middle of Line 32230 300 End of Line Middle of Line 37500 300 End of Line Middle of Line 29730 300 End of Line 10 301 End of Line Middle of Line 1710 302 End of Line Middle of Line 10210 301 End of Line Middle of Line 48150 302 End of Line Middle of Line 13740 302 End of Line Middle of Line 840 301 End of Line Middle of Line 20440 301 End of Line Middle of Line 520 301 End of Line Middle of Line 4900 301 End of Line Middle of Line 2020 301 End of Line Middle of Line 280 301 End of Line Middle of Line 860 301 End of Line Middle of Line 280 301 End of Line Middle of Line 1350 301 End of Line Middle of Line 3640 301 End of Line Middle of Line 530 301 End of Line 310 301 End of Line 10 301 End of Line Middle of Line 36830 301 End of Line Middle of Line 1620 302 End of Line Middle of Line 5830 301 End of Line Middle of Line 2680 301 End of Line Middle of Line 10560 300 End of Line

Faulted Segment
End Node

800 802 806 808 812 814 816 816 818 820 824 828 830 832 834 834 836 836 842 844 846 850 852 854 858 858 860 888

802 806 808 812 814 850 818 824 820 822 828 830 854 858 860 842 840 862 844 846 848 816 832 852 864 834 836 890

ANN-2
ph-ph and ph-ph-g 42 1e-6 1e-6 MSE 1500

ANN-3
three phase 47

V.

SIMULATIONS AND RESULTS

After training all of ANNs for fault location, the networks have been tested for data included in training set and the data from simulation that has not been used for training. Figure 4 illustrates the actual and estimated reactance for single phase to ground fault in all line section of simulated system when the Rg is equal to 5 ohm.

Figure 3. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-1 for a-g faults in the middle and end of lines along the test system when Rg =0

The states of simulation are the same as figure 2 that are mentioned in Table III, except that the large values for the line section between node 888 and 890 (in figure 2) are not shown in this figure to better illustration of the difference between actual and estimated reactance. Figures 5, 6 and 7 show actual and estimated reactance for two phase fault (a-b), two phase to ground fault a-b-g with Rg=60 , and three phase fault (a-b-c) respectively. States of simulation for these figures are selected in the same way like the states printed in table III for figure 3 but there are differences between the figures because our test system is unbalance. As described in section III, this distribution test system is an unbalance system with nonhomogeneity, hence segments like the lines between node 816 and node 822 that are single phase (phase a) cannot play a role in two or three phases faults. As it can be seen, the networks can estimate the reactance with acceptable accuracy for the data from the training set. To evaluate the performance of networks for data that not been used for training, we simulated faults with Rg=2 and Rg=40 ohm, and the obtained phasors were fed to networks to compare the estimated outputs with the actual values. Figures 7 and 8 show the desired and estimated values of reactance to fault point for a-g fault and a-b-g faults for Rg=2 and Rg=40 ohm. As it can be seen estimated values are very close to the real values.
Figure 7. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-2 for a-b-c faults along the test system

Figure 8. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-1 for a-g faults along the test system when Rg =2

Figure 9. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-2 for a-c-g faults along the test system when Rg =40

Figure 4.

Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-1 for a-g faults along the test system when Rg =5

Figure 10 illustrates the MSE histogram between desired and estimated values of reactance for values in figure 4. The MSE histogram for the values in figure 8 is shown in figure 11. As it can be seen from the figures these networks can estimate the reactance to fault with good accuracy. To find the location of fault and faulted segment, we must refer to a table that listed the length of each line segment and values of reactance from the measuring point at substation (node 800 in figure 1) to each node in distribution system and by interpolating between the estimated reactance and values in table, estimate the fault distance.

Figure 5. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-2 for a-b faults along the test system

Figure 6. Actual and the estimated values of reactance by ANN-2 for a-b-g faults along the test system when Rg =60

Figure 10. Histogram of absolute percentage error (APE) between the desired and estimated values of reactance for the figure 4.

[6]

R. Das, M.S. Sachdev, and T.S. Sidhu, A technique for estimating locations of shunt faults on distribution lines, in Proc. of IEEE Conf. on Communications, Power, and Computing, vol. 1, Manitoba, Canada, pp. 6-1, May 1995. M. El-Hami, L.L. Lai, D.J. Daruvala, and A.T. Johns, A new travellingwave based scheme for fault detection on overhead power distribution feeders, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 1825-1833, Oct. 1992. Z.Q. Bo, G. Waller, and M.A. Redfern, Accurate fault location technique for distribution system using fault-generated high-frequency transient voltage signals, IEE Proc. GTD, vol. 146, no. 1, pp. 73-79, Jan. 1999. C. Fukui and J. Kawakami, An expert system for fault section estimation using information from protective relays and circuit breakers, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol. PWRD-1, no. 4, pp. 8390, Oct. 1986.

[7]

Figure 11. Histogram of absolute percentage error (APE) between the desired and estimated values of reactance for the figure 8.

[8]

According to the single line diagram of the test system in figure 1, the 34 node distribution test system consists of a primary main feeder with single phase and three laterals. The trained ANNs can estimate the reactance to the point of fault and by referring to the reactance table of system, the faulted segment of system will be known, but in some cases the estimated value of reactance may belong to two line segments: one in main feeder and one in lateral feeder. Algorithms that use single end phasors of current and voltage cannot discriminate the fault in main feeder and lateral feeder for the same values of phasor. In such cases if some protection device like fuse was installed in the tap off node, by checking the status of protection device in the lateral feeder the fault location can be estimated. VI. CONCLUSIONS

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[10] Y.Y. Hsu, F.C. Lu, Y. Chien, J.P. Liu, and J.T. Lin An expert system for locating distribution system faults, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 366-372, Jan. 1991. [11] H.T. Yang, W.Y. Chang, and C.L. Huang, A new neural networks approach to on-line fault section estimation using information of protective relays and circuit breakers, IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 220-230, Jan. 1994. [12] J. Coser, D. T. do Vale, and J. G. Rolim, Design and training of artificial neural networks for locating low current faults in distribution systems, The 14th Int. Conf. on Intelligent System Applications to Power Systems ( ISAP), pp. 1-6, 2007. [13] Mathworks, SimulinkDynamic System Simulation for Matlab. The Mathworks Inc., 2000. [14] H. Demuth, M. Beale, and M. Hagan, Neural Network Toolbox 6 Users Guide. The Math Works Inc., 2009. [15] S. Samarasinghe, Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering from Fundamentals to Complex Pattern Recognition. Auerbach Publications, 2006 [16] S. Haykin, Neural Networks A Comprehensive Foundation. 2nd Ed., Prentice Hall: NJ, 1999. [17] Distribution test feeders. IEEE PES Distribution System Analysis Subcommittee. Available at: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/pes/dsacom/testfeeders [18] W. H. Kersting, Radial distribution test feeders distribution system analysis subcommittee report, in proc. of Power Eng. Soc. Winter Meeting, , Columbus, OH,. vol. 2, pp. 908912, Jan. 2001. [19] IEEE Standard for digitizing waveform recorders, IEEE Standard 10572007, April 2008. [20] J. A. Silva, H. B. Funmilavo, and K. L. Bultler-Purry, Impact of distributed generation on the IEEE 34 node radial test feeder with overcurrent protection, Proc. 39th North American Power Symposium (NAPS), pp. 49-57, 2007

In this paper an ANN based fault location in distribution system were considered. First the principle of fault location employing ANN was discussed then IEEE 34 node test feeder was used for testing the fault location algorithm. The results for fault location illustrated that if proper data that can cover a wide range of contingencies of fault in distribution system, were selected for training an ANN and the parameters of the ANN were suitably set, this ANN can estimate reactance to the fault very accurately even in a such non-homogenous distribution system. REFERENCES
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