A Wavelet- Based Fault Localization in

Transmission Network
Sushma Verma, Pratyay Konar, and Dr. Paramita Chattopadhyay.

transform approaches. Due to this they have received great

Abstract-- The proposed technique consists of a pre-processing
unit based on Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) in
combination with an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). CWT
acts as an extractor of distinctive features in the transient current
signals at the sending and receiving end of the transmission line.
This information is then fed to the ANN for detecting the fault
type and location of fault. The results presented clearly indicate
that the present technique is very fast, computationally efficient
and intelligent enough to accurately identify three different types
of fault (LG & LLG) and their locations.
Index Terms-- Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Alternate
Transient Program(ATP), Continuous Wavelet Transform
(CWT), Fault location, Wavelet Transform, Transmission line .
I. INTRODUCTION
HE electrical power system network is spread widely
attention in the power community in the last few years. The
potential benefits of applying Wavelet Transforms in
combination with soft computing techniques for improving the
performance of protective relays have already been recognized
by various researchers. In the mainstream literature, wavelets
were first applied to power system in 1994 by Robertson and
Ribeiro as reported in [5]. From this year the number of
publications in this area has increased exponentially. There
are various approaches for analysis of power system faults
based on expert system [1],[3],[4] fuzzy logic [6],
optimization [2], pattern recognition approach [7], artificial
neural network (ANN) [8], wavelet techniques [9], etc. Each
of them has some difficulties in achieving speed, selectivity
and accuracy. Discrete wavelet transform in combination with
ANN has also been implemented for this purpose. However

T throughout the geographical regions. The demand of

power is growing with the development of the country.
there is no report of using Continuous Wavelet Transform
(CWT) in classification of power system transients. CWT has
The growing demand leads to the interconnection of the power great potential in analyzing system transients.
networks. As the number of interconnections is increasing
II. PROPOSED SCHEME
everyday the existing power system has become increasingly
complex. There are various equipments in the power system Keeping the above viewpoints in mind the present work has
network at both the ends. The exposure of overhead line been directed towards the development of CWT-ANN based
experiences a permanent or short duration fault. There are fast, intelligent and reliable algorithm to discriminate and
various causes like capacitor switching, lightning, high identify different power system transients. The work has been
impedance faults etc. that leads to transient disturbances in mainly focused on identification of different types of
transmission lines. These transients pose a great challenge to transmission line faults along with their locations. The
the power system engineers. The increasing complexity of the schematic representation of the proposed work is shown in the
modern power system network requires a fast fault detection fig. 1.
technique by making the transient an important phenomenon.
The fault current has the fundamental, higher order harmonics
and time-domain information. Analysis of these higher order
harmonics and their time information plays a very important
role for the detection of faults. The Wavelet Transforms are
best suited for the analysis of transient waveforms than other

S. Verma is with Techno India College of Technology ,Rajarhat District

Kolkata, India (e-mail: sushma.verma1976@gmail.com).

P.Konar is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, B.E.S.U,Shibpur

University, Howrah, India (e-mail: pratyaymaithon@gmail.com)

P.Chattopadhyay is with the Department of Electrical Engineering,B.E.S.U,

Shibpur, Howrah, India (e-mail: paramita_chattopadhyay@yahoo.com

978-1-4673-0136-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

Fig. 1 Block diagram of the proposed scheme
 III. SIMULATION OF TRANSMISSION LINE MODEL
In this study a power system network consisting of two
three phase voltage sources are used. The length of the
transmission line is 80 km.
Fig. 2 Single line diagram for system under study
The power transmission system was modeled with EMTP
to test the performance of the proposed scheme. The single
line diagram for the system under study is presented in Fig. 2
along with the EMTP/ATP model in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 EMTP Model for 80 Km line with single line to ground fault
Extensive simulations were carried out, with different fault
locations , for single line to ground fault (LG) and double line
to ground fault (LLG) for different fault resistances (10Ω, 50Ω
and100Ω). Three phase transient current signals from both
sending and receiving ends were captured using ATP/ EMTP
simulation environment. The current wave forms were
generated at a sampling frequency of 2 KHz as shown in Figs.
4 and 5.
Fig. 4 Phase ‘a’ current for single line to ground fault as recorded on sending
end side.
A wavelet is a waveform of effectively limited duration that
has an average value of zero. Comparing wavelets with sine
waves, which are the basis of Fourier analysis, it can be
appreciated that sinusoids are smooth and predictable;
wavelets tend to be irregular and asymmetric. Fourier analysis
consists of breaking up a signal into sine waves of various
frequencies. Similarly, wavelet analysis is the breaking up of a
signal into shifted and scaled versions of the original (or
mother) wavelet. So, sharp changes might be better analyzed
with an irregular wavelet than with a smooth sinusoid.
Therefore, to summarize the procedure of wavelet analysis
may run like this – a wavelet prototype function, called an
analyzing wavelet or mother wavelet is adopted and then
temporal analysis is performed with a contracted, high-
frequency version of the prototype wavelet, while frequency
analysis is performed with a dilated, low frequency version of
the same wavelet. Thus the original signal or function can be
represented in terms of a wavelet expansion (using coefficients
in a linear combination of the wavelet functions). Data
operations can be performed using just the corresponding
wavelet coefficients.
Fig. 5 Phase ‘a’ current for single line to ground fault as recorded on
receiving end side.
The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is defined as the
sum over all time of the signal multiplied by scaled, shifted
versions of the wavelet function Ψ.
Lψ f ( s,τ ) = ∫ f (t )Ψs*,τ (t ) dt (1)
f (t) is decomposed into a set of basis function ψ (t), called
wavelets generated from a single basic wavelet ψ(t), the so
called mother wavelet, by scaling and translation
1  t −τ  (2)
Ψs ,τ (t ) = Ψ 
s  s 
s is a scale factor, τ is the translation factor and the factor
s is for energy normalization across the different scale.
Scaling a wavelet simply means stretching or compressing it.
In this work CWT has been used as a signal processing
tool, because CWT has a great potential in analyzing system
transients. The raw data of the transient current signals were
imported in the MATLAB workspace and CWT coefficients
were computed for ‘coif1’ mother wavelet using wavelet tool
box commands. Typical CWT coefficient plots of the transient
signals are shown in Fig 6 and Fig 7. For all simulation step
length of moving window was set to 1/8th cycle (50 Hz
supply). Finally the RMS vale of the CWT coefficient was
computed. The R.M.S values of CWT coefficients thus
obtained were used as attributes to train the Artificial Neural
Network (ANN). The ANN can easily identify the types of
faults and their locations.
Fig. 6 CWT Phase ‘a’ for Sending end current for single line to ground fault.
Fig. 7 CWT Phase ‘a’ for Receiving end current for single line to ground
fault.
IV. FAULT TYPE IDENTIFICATION AND FAULT LOCATION
DETECTION USING ANN
Post Processing and Diagnosis of faults was done by using
Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as a classifier. In this work,
a two layer feed forward neural network has been trained by
back propagation algorithm.
A feed-forward back-propagation neural network has three
components: an input layer, one or more hidden layers, and an
output layer. Each layer consists of one or more neurons called
nodes. In the calculation process of problem solving, all input
nodes are collected at each hidden node after being multiplied
by weights. Later, a bias is attached to this sum, transformed
through a nonlinearity function, and transferred to the next
layer. There are several functions such as hyperbolic tangent,
sigmoid and linear functions that can be used as transfer
function. The same procedure can be followed in the next
layer to provide the network output results. As the forward
processing arrives at the output layer, the overall error
between the network output and the actual observation is
calculated. The error at the output layer propagates backward
to the input layer through the hidden layer in the network to
obtain the final desired outputs. During the forward pass all
the weights of the networks are fixed. During the backward
pass, on the other hand, all the weights are adjusted in
accordance with an error-correction rule.
V. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
The architecture of the developed wavelet based ANN
models have been presented in Fig 8 (a) & (b).
Fig. 8(a) Neural Network Architecture fault classification
Fig. 8(b) Neural Network Architecture fault localization
They have been used for classifying types of fault and to
determine fault locations of the three phase transmission
networks. The developed ANNs have six input neurons
namely RMS values of CWT coefficients of 3-ph sending and
receiving end currents. The ANN models used are shown in
fig. 8(a) and 8(b). The ANN model has three output neurons
for fault classification and one output neuron for fault
localization. The activation functions at the hidden layers and
output layer in the network have been tan-sigmoid and log-
sigmoid respectively.
Total 180 feature samples were simulated for different
switching, single line to ground (LG) and double line to
ground fault (LLG) fault conditions at different locations.
Among them 120 samples were used for classification purpose
and remaining 60 samples for testing the classifier’s
generalization ability. From the test results furnished in Table I
and Table II implies that wavelet based techniques correctly
classify the types of faults and their locations also.
TABLE I
FAULT CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY
Type of Fault Training Testing
Accuracy Accuracy
L-G Fault in phase ‘a’ at 55 km
(50 Ω)
99.6% 98.1%
L-L-G Fault in phase ‘a’ and ‘b’ at
99.3% 99.4 %
45 km (100 Ω)
L-L-G Fault in phase ‘c’ and ‘b’ at
98.3% 99.2%
35 km (50 Ω)
 TABLE II Vector Machines (SVM) or rough set theory can be applied
FAULT LOCALIZATION ACCURACY
for improved classifications or prediction and to overcome the
limitations of ANN may be exploited.
Training Testing Type
of Fault
Desired Network Desired Network VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Output Output Output Output The authors are thankful to Mr. Vijaykumar Garlapati for his
efforts towards this project.
10 10.81 10 9.91 L-G Fault
(phase ‘a’)
10 10.11 10 10.09 VIII. REFERENCES
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30 29.84 30 28.97
[3] Park Young Moon, Kim Gwang-Won, “A logic based expert system for
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VI. CONCLUSIONS
In the present era of open access and deregulated electricity
market, it is very important to restore the system after fault
clearance. Accurate identification of fault and its location is
thus of prime concern, where the transient signals can play a
very vital role. This work is a preliminary report of a research
project with a long term goal to utilize the power system
transient signals for fast and accurate discrimination of
different switching conditions. The present study demonstrates
the effectiveness of transient current signals to identify the
fault type and fault locations of three phase system. The
properties of the proposed scheme are:
• The Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) provides an
efficient way to extract important fault features.
• Neural network provides an intelligent method and a soft
criterion for feature comparison.
However there is ample scope of work. Variation of pre-
fault load and system conditions and fault resistances, best
feature selection of wavelet coefficients, impact of mother-
wavelet, variation of scale may be explored in future. Apart
from the ANN other soft-computing techniques like Support
IX. BIOGRAPHIES
Sushma Verma born, on Dec 17 , 1976 is currently
working as an Assistant Professor in Techno India
college of Technology in Electrical Engineering
Department, Rajarhat, Kolkata. She graduated from
Government Engineering College, Bhuj, Gujarat., India
and completed Masters Degree from Guru Nanak Dev
Engineering College, Punjab from Punjab Technical
University.
After her graduation she worked as a Trainee
Engineer in Standard Electricals Limited Company,
Jalandhar, Punjab.She served as an expatriate lecturer in Royal Bhutan
Institute of Engineering and Technology, Bhutan, for two years. Her special
fields of interest are Power Sytem Transients and Power System Protection.
She is currently working under the esteemed guidance of Dr. Paramita
Chattopadhyay.
Pratyay Konar received B.Tech. in Electrical
Engineering from Asansol Engineering College under
West Bengal University of Technology, India in 2007
and M.E. in Electrical Engineering with Electrical
Machine specialization from Bengal Engineering and
Science University, Shibpur, India in 2009. He is
currently working to pursue Ph.D. in Bengal
Engineering College and Science University, Shibpur,
India. His research interests include image processing
and application of advanced signal processing and applied soft computing
technique to condition monitoring of electrical machines.

Paramita Chattopadhyay received the B.E., M.E.,

and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Bengal
Engineering College and Science University,
Shibpur, India in 1993, 1996, and 2002, respectively.
She is an Assistant Professor at Bengal Engineering
and Science University, Shibpur, India in Electrical
Engineering Department where she specializes in the
field of condition monitoring, power system
protection and power system transient analysis. Her
research interests are applications of advanced signal
processing and soft computing technique in the area of condition monitoring
of electrical machines, power systems and nano material applications in
power sectors.