Arcing Fault Detection in Distribution Lines

Partial discharge of an insulator or surge arrester is a symptom of an insulation breakdown or insulation failure. It is very important to know the position of discharge source as soon as possible in order to remove this cause. In order to achieve remote monitoring of the faults due to an insulator and surge arrester on the distribution systems, the most important things need to do is to determine the type of fault. The correlation of voltage and current in an electrical arc is entirely different from that in solid conductors. In this paper, an overview of main fault location techniques and arc modeling principles were given. Preliminary laboratory tests on insulators and surge arresters and field tests on an overhead line were presented. Simulations of faults on a distribution system were carried out for the fault identification and location. These indicated that known signatures are associated with these types of failures which could be used for fault recognition. More importantly, specific configuration of the network at the point of measurement need to be known and taken into account in the analysis in order to provide accurate location of the fault.