Faulty Section Location Method Based on Dynamic Time Warping Distance in a Resonant Grounding System

Abstract

When a single-phase grounding fault occurs in a resonant grounding system, the determination of the fault location remains a significant challenge due to the small fault current and the instability of the grounding arc. In order to solve the problem of low protection sensitivity when a high-resistance grounding fault occurs in a resonant grounding system, this paper proposes a fault location method based on the combination of dynamic time warping (DTW) distance and fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering. By analyzing the characteristics of the zero-sequence current upstream and downstream of the fault point when a single-phase grounding fault occurs in the resonant grounding system, it is concluded that the waveform similarity on both sides of the fault point is low. DTW distance can be used to measure the similarity of two time series, and has the characteristics of good fault tolerance and synchronization error tolerance. According to the rule that the DTW value of faulty section is much larger than that of nonfaulty sections, FCM clustering is used to classify the DTW value of each section. The membership degree matrix and cluster centers are obtained. In the membership degree matrix, the section corresponding to the data in a class of their own is the faulty section, and all other data correspond to the nonfaulty section; otherwise, it is a fault occurring at the end of the line. The simulation results of MATLAB/Simulink and the field data test show that the method can accurately locate the faulty section.