NREL, NIST and University of Colorado, Boulder recently completed a research project funded by the DOE Solar Energy Technologies Office to study fault generated traveling waves in an electrical distribution system. The technical report on this work is publicly available on the publication portal OSTI.gov.
The motivation for the work was derived from experts working to improve protection functions of the distribution system, and their interest in considering fault initiated traveling waves for in cases where traditional protection methods may not address the needs of circuits with distributed inverter-based resources and low fault currents.
The project and the technical report focus on wide band modeling of distribution system components to accurately model traveling wave propagation in simulation, the experimental setup needed to emulate traveling waves in a laboratory, and novel signal processing techniques needed to extract spatial localization of originating faults using wideband measurements of traveling wave features.
