A universal fault location technique for N-terminal (n [??] 3) transmission lines

This paper presents a universal fault location technique for N-terminal (N [??] 3) transmission lines based on synchronized phasor measurement units. The development of the technique is based on two-terminal fault location technique. The proposed algorithm is different from traditional multiterminal fault location techniques. We apply two-terminal fault location technique to N-terminal transmission lines and propose a novel fault section selector/fault locator. The proposed method has a very good tolerance. The proposed approach provides an analytical solution and its computational burden is very low since it does not require iterative operations. An extensive series of simulations were conducted to verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm. The average fault location error under various fault conditions is well below 1%. Index Terms--Fault location, multiterminal transmission lines, phasor measurement units (PMUs).