A novel fault location scheme for transmission lines connected to wind farm based on variational iteration method

Abstract The phenomenon of wind abandoned caused by fault of transmission lines has occurred frequently. Since fault current output by wind turbine after fault may induce the frequency variation of the fundamental frequency, fault location based on the fundamental resistance is easily invalid. In order to locate fault accurately and rapidly after wind farm transmission line faults, a time‐domain‐based novel fault location method for transmission line of wind farm is introduced in this paper. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to discretise the distributed‐parameter model of transmission line that is given in the form of partial differential equations by using the finite‐difference time‐domain. In addition, the phase current and voltage at both ends of lines are regarded as boundary conditions. Then, the variational iteration method is utilised to calculate transmission line equations to obtain line length function. At last, fault location function is constructed by a minimised objective function. This paper builds wind power transmission line system simulation model and carries out simulation experiments on PSCAD/EMTDC. To verify the performance of the algorithm, several factors are taken into account for simulation including different fault distances, different fault types, different fault resistances, and different fault inception angles. Simulation results reveal the performance of the proposed method to locate fault for transmission lines connected to wind farm with high accuracy.