A novel scheme for distance and section estimation of steady-state faults in microgrids using voltage and current measurement at the beginning bus and the end buses of the microgrid

Microgrids are constantly exposed to a wide range of faults that may affect their performance. The occurrence of a fault may lead to problems such as harming the network’s equipment, delaying service to customers, unstabilizing the network, and eventually undermining the network’s reliability. Therefore, accurate fault location at the proper time is crucial. In this paper, a method is proposed to determine the fault distance and section of single and multi-phase faults in alternative current microgrids using voltage and current data from the beginning node and nodes at the end of the microgrid. This method obtains the location of the fault based on the calculation of the voltage and current difference on both sides of the fault. Moreover, the data from less than a quarter of the cycle after the occurrence of fault with the presence of renewable resources, and the distributed-parameters line model (DPLM) are used. The proposed method is insensitive to fault resistance, fault inception angles, unbalanced network, different distributed generation operation conditions, and changes in the line parameters, and it is independent of the island and grid-connected modes. To evaluate the proposed scheme, a microgrid with 12 nodes is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The maximum error obtained from this method is 1%, which demonstrates the acceptable accuracy of the proposed algorithm compared to other similar techniques.