Underground MV Network Failures’ Waveform Characteristics—An Investigation

Abstract

The authors seek to investigate the characteristics of outage-causing faults that can be observed in a short time frame after their occurrence: waveform of the voltages and currents. The aim is to identify which characteristics can be used to estimate the failure type immediately after its occurrence. This paper lays the groundwork to determine which features display a stronger relation to four failure types with the aim of using this information in a later work, not presented in this paper, aimed at designing a reliable failure type estimator from readily available data. This paper focuses on the most common failures of the underground cable MV networks in Portugal: cable insulation; cable joint; secondary substation busbar; and excavation-motivated failures. A set of 206 waveform records of real underground MV network failures was available for analysis. After investigating the waveforms, the authors identified seven waveform characteristics which can be used for failure type estimation. Fault type characteristics can be used to distinguish secondary substation failures from the remaining failure types. Fault evolution does not yield relevant information. Fault self-extinction phenomenon was not observed in excavation-caused failures. There are differences for self-extinction characteristics between secondary substation busbar failures and the cable insulation and joint failures. Fault inception instant and arc voltage are two characteristics which are shown to have a promising merit to the identification process of failure types. Finally, fault intra-cycle repetitive extinction results have been found to be very similar for cable insulation failures and joint failures, but otherwise different regarding the remaining failure types.