Customized Fault Management System for Low Voltage (LV) Distribution Automation System

Supply disruption such as overloading will cause interruptions of electricity supply to customers. The technicians have to manually locate the fault point and this tedious work may last for extended periods of time. The other reasons are the lack of use of efficient tools for operational planning and advanced methodology for quick detection of fault, isolation of the faulty section and service restoration. Currently, fault detection, isolation and service restoration takes a long time causing the interruption of supply for a longer duration. An active development phase of information technology has given significant impact to the distribution network fault management. There is a tendency towards fully automated switching systems with the introduction of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. The decision making feature of the fault management system is depend on SCADA system. SCADA can be used to handle the tasks which are currently handled by the people and can reduce frequency of periodic visit of technical personal substantially. SCADA is a process control system that enables a site operator to monitor and control processes that are distributed among various remote sites. The control functions are related to switching operations, such as switching a capacitor, or reconfiguring feeders. Once the fault location has been analyzed, the automatic function for fault isolation and supply restoration is executed. When the faulty line section is encountered, it is isolated, and the remaining sections are energized. This function directly impacts the customers as well as the system reliability. This chapter presents the development of a fault management system for distribution automation system (DAS) for operating and controlling low voltage (LV) downstream system such as 415 V for three phase system and 240 V for single phase system. The fault management system is referred as the fault detection, fault location, fault isolation, electricity restoration and automatic operation and control. This done because system is equipped with automated equipment to detect earth fault and over-current faults and identify them accordingly. An embedded controller with Ethernet access is used as remote terminal unit (RTU) to act as converter for human machine interface (HMI) and to interact with the digital input and output modules. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is integrated with the RTU for automatic operating and controlling the distribution system. The laboratory results are compared with the simulation results to verify the results and make the achieved results credible.