Electric Power Systems Research 77 (2007) 13491362

Wavelet based noise cancellation technique for fault location on underground power cables
C.K. Jung a, , J.B. Lee a , X.H. Wang b , Y.H. Song c
b

Department of Electrical Engineering, Wonkwang University, 344-2, Shinyong-dong, Iksan, Republic of Korea School of Computing and Information System, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE, London, UK c Department of Computing and Information System, Brunel University, Middlesex UB8 3PH, London, UK Received 29 December 2005; received in revised form 18 September 2006; accepted 16 October 2006 Available online 16 November 2006

Abstract This paper describes a new algorithm to identify the reective waves for fault location in noisy environment. The new algorithm is based on the correlation of detail components at adjacent levels of stationary wavelet transform of current signal from one end of the cable. The algorithm is simple and straightforward. Simulation results based on a real power transmission system proved it can detect and locate the fault in very difcult situations. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Fault location; Fault classication; Underground power cable system; Stationary wavelet transform

1. Introduction The potential benets of applying wavelet transform in power cable fault location have been recognized by many researchers [19]. The wavelet transform has the ability to localize the signals in both time and frequency domains. This makes it particularly useful in capturing the transients at one end or both ends of the cable and locate the fault position. This refers to single-ended or double-ended fault location. Between these two approaches, single-ended approach is less expensive and more reliable as it does not need communication link between the ends of the cable and requires only one equipment to operate rather than two at both ends. This reduces the errors caused by the different equipment and synchronization of time at both ends. Therefore, single-ended approach is more practical and accurate in fault location. The single-ended approach uses reected transients from either the fault or other end to locate the fault. This raises some problems of detecting the reected transients on underground power cable system. If the reections are from fault point, they will be very weak because part of the signals will transmit to

Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 63 850 6735; fax: +82 63 850 6735. E-mail address: chekyun@wonkwang.ac.kr (C.K. Jung).

the other end from fault point. If the reections are from the other end, same problem still exists as part of the signals will reect back. At the same time, the signal will travel a long way to reach the measurement end. Since the high frequency transients have a very high attenuation in the cables, the reection will become weak after the long way traveling. It is clear that the magnitudes of the reections are much smaller than the rst transient. In addition, the measurement will be noisy. Sometimes the noise level may be higher than the reections. Then how to discriminate the weak reection from the noise is a big issue. The transients have many irregular signals, and all of them are useable signal. However, only transients at specic frequency are useful to locate the fault. The rest are useless. Therefore, this paper considers unnecessary signals as noise. In this paper, a new algorithm was proposed to discriminate the reected signals from noise and thus locate the fault. The algorithm is based on the correlation of the wavelet coefcients at multi-scales. For wavelet transform, the stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is introduced instead of conventional discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Stationary wavelet transform uses upsampling at each level of decomposition that causes redundancy. In wavelet transform, the number of elements per scale and location is xedindependent of scale. The redundancy increases the elements per scale and location at coarse scales. In term of denoising, there

0378-7796/$ see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.epsr.2006.10.005

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is an advantage in having more orientations than necessary at coarse scales. It is better in noisy signal processing [10,11]. After brief review of the stationary wavelet transform in second section, fault classication algorithm and noise cancellation technique for fault location will be discussed in Sections 4 and 5, based on a real cable system described in Section 3. The algorithms will be tested by simulations in Section 6. The last section concludes the paper. 2. Stationary wavelet transform In this section, the basic principles of the SWT method will be presented. In summery, the SWT method can be described as at each level, when the high and low pass lters are applied to the data, the two new sequences have the same length as the original sequences. To do this, the original data is not decimated. However, the lters at each level are modied by padding them out with zeros. Supposing a function f(x) is projected at each step j on the subset Vj (. . . V3 V2 V1 V0 ). This projection is dened by the scalar product cj,k of f(x) with the scaling function (x) which is dilated and translated: cj,k = f (x), j,k (x) j,k (x) = 2j (2j x k) (1) (2)

However, for stationary or redundant transform, instead of downsampling, an upsampling procedure is carried out before performing lter convolution at each scale. The distance between samples increases by a factor of 2 from scale j to the next. cj+1,k is obtained by: cj+1,k =
l

h(l)cj,k+2j l

(6)

and the discrete wavelet coefcients: j+1,k =

l

g(l)cj,k+2j l

(7)

where l indicates the nite length. 3. Model system The diagram of a real power cable system to be discussed in this paper is shown in Fig. 1. It is a single core cable transmission system with the voltage of 154 kV. The total length of the cable is 6.284 km. It consists of ve crossbonded major sections with three minor sections for each major section. As usual, the sheaths are jointed and crossbonded between two sections. In this paper, the single line to ground fault is considered in real power cable system to test the proposed algorithm and Alternative Transient Programs (ATP) program is used for system modeling and simulation. The sampling frequency is 1 MHz, the propagation velocities of traveling wave on power cable system is 1.67487 105 km/s. The applied fault inception angle is 0 , 45 , 60 and 90 , respectively. In order to calculate the distance to fault point, single line to ground fault is supposed to occur at 13 km from A S/S. Fault resistance is assumed to be 0, 0.5 and 1 , respectively. 4. Algorithm for fault classication Wavelet transform decomposes the signal into approximation and detail coefcients, forming approximations and details. The approximations are the high-scale, low-frequency components of the signal, while the details are the low-scale, high-frequency components. The decomposition process can be iterated. Normally the rst level detail in wavelet transform contains the information to detect the fault. In order to detect the fault, threshold is set. If the signal exceeds the threshold, then it is supposed that a fault has occurred. However, the spike can be detected on all phases. It is difcult to discriminate on which phase the fault is. For many signals, the low frequency contents are the most important parts. They give the signal their identities to some extents. For SWT decomposition, the approximation contains the low frequency components. The more levels the signals are decomposed, the lower frequency the components will be. For fault detection and classication, the 4th level approximations of current on phases AC will be used. If the fault occurs on phase A, the magnitude of approximation on phases B and C are very low comparing to that on phase A after some delayed

where (x) is the scaling function, which is a low-pass lter. cj,k , is also called a discrete approximation at the resolution 2j . If (x) is the wavelet function, the wavelet coefcients are obtained by: j,k = f (x), 2j (2j x k) (3)

where j,k is called the discrete detail signal at the resolution 2j . As the scaling function (x) has the property: 1 x = 2 2 h(n)(x n),
n

where h(n) is the low-pass lter. cj+1,k can be obtained by direct computation from cj,k cj+1,k =
n

h(n 2k)cj,n

and

x 1 = 2 2

g(n)(xn)
n

(4)

where g(n) is the high-pass lter. The scalar products f(x),2(j+1) (2(j+1) x k) are computed with: j+1,k =
n

g(n 2k)cj,n

(5)

Eqs. (4) and (5) are the multi-resolution algorithm of the traditional discrete wavelet transform. In this transform, a downsampling algorithm is used to perform the transformation. That is one point out of two is kept during transformation. Therefore, the whole length of the function f(x) will reduce by half after the transformation. This process continues until the length of the function becomes one.

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Fig. 1. Underground power cable system.

ratio on the faulty phase should be unity since its approximation is equal to the maximum value, while the ratios on the other two phases are near zero because of the weak signals. Therefore, if two ratios are near zero, it can deduce that a fault has occurred, and the faulty phase can be classied as the one whose ratio is equal to unity. A simple ow chart of the procedure is shown is Fig. 2. Faults on phase A were applied for testing the fault detection and classication algorithm. However, an extensive investigation has been carried out to study the fault with various conditions which include the different positions, inception angles and fault resistance. The calculated ratios are shown in Table 1. The ratios on all faulty phases show unity because its approximation is equal to the maximum value regardless of fault conditions, while the ratios on other two phases are near zero. From these results, the fault on which phase will be easily identied. 5. Noise cancellation technique After applying the wavelet transform the details of the rst level are shown in Figs. 3 and 4 in case of fault at 1 and 2 km. As shown in these gures, many spikes appeared because of the reected transients from both fault point and other end of the cable including many noises. Therefore, it is very difcult to discriminate which transient is the fault generated. This makes the fault location by the wavelet transformation impossible. How to remove the noise interference is a big issue and up to date no solutions have been provided. A new solution based on correlation of multiple scales of the transients will be presented. As shown in Figs. 3 and 4, it is very difcult to discriminate the fault transients by the rst level details. However, only one

Fig. 2. Flow chart for fault detection and classication.

sampling time from the fault inception. Then an algorithm is established to classify the fault. For every sampling point exceeding the threshold on the rst detail, approximations of the three-phase currents on 4th level are calculated as A4j , where j = 1, 2 and 3 for three phases. The maximum approximation among three phases is denoted as Amax . Then the absolute ratio of the approximations on each single phase to the maximum approximation is calculated. The
Table 1 Ratio under different fault conditions Fault conditions Fault resistance ( ) 0 Fault distance (km) 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 = 0 ra 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 rb 0.0537 0.0459 0.0436 0.0505 0.0433 0.0409 0.0449 0.0376 0.0352 rc 0.0513 0.0447 0.0362 0.0485 0.0421 0.0337 0.0431 0.0367 0.0280 = 45 ra 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 rb

= 60 rc 0.0512 0.0446 0.04360 0.0482 0.0409 0.0324 0.0431 0.0358 0.03 ra 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 rb 0.0519 0.0447 0.0426 0.0466 0.04091 0.0374 0.0397 0.0326 0.0308 rc 0.04 0.0435 0.0355 0.0449 0.0385 0.0279 0.0385 0.0321 0.0343

= 90 ra 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 rb 0.0436 0.0355 0.0341 0.0487 0.0402 0.0378 0.0456 0.0369 0.0343 rc 0.0407 0.0337 0.0242 0.0456 0.0386 0.0279 0.0419 0.0355 0.0254

0.0513 0.0460 0.04 0.0483 0.03 0.0398 0.0429 0.0367 0.0343

0.5

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Fig. 3. First level details of the wavelet transform at 1 km fault according to fault resistance (fault inception angle: 0 ): (a) fault resistance: 0 ; (b) fault resistance: 0.5 ; (c) fault resistance: 1 .

transient is signicant with the high value while the magnitudes of the other transients are relatively low. It is discovered that the wavelet maxima at a scale 2j will propagate to another maxima at the coarser scale 2j+1 if both maxima belong to the same maxima line [12]. For the white noises, on average, the number of maxima decreases by a factor of 2 when the scale increases by 2. Half of the maxima do not propagate from the scale 2j to the scale 2j+1 . We adopted a simple algorithm to remove the noise relied on the variations in the scale of the wavelet transform data of the signal by using direct multiplication of the wavelet data at adjacent scales [13]. Our approach to detect the fault transients and locate the fault also bases on the variation of the wavelet

data at adjacent scales by using the direct multiplication. It is simple, quick and straightforward. Supposing the signal is decomposed by the wavelet at n levels, the detail coefcients will be D1 , D2 , . . ., Dn . Then the details at rst two scales will be multiplied directly, give a correlation Corr1 as in Eq. (8). Next the correlation is rescaled to the rst detail by Eq. (9). Corr1 = D1 D2 Corr new1 = Corr1 PD1 n 2 PCorr1 (8) (9)

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Fig. 4. First level details of the wavelet transform at 2 km fault according to fault resistance (fault inception angle: 45 ): (a) fault resistance: 0 ; (b) fault resistance: 0.5 ; (c) fault resistance: 1 .

2 and P where PD1 = D1 Corr12 are the powers of Corr1 = detail D1 and Corr1. n is iteration number. Next is to compare the absolute value of Corr new1 and D1. Values where D1 is more than Corr new1 are identied and stored in a new variable. This one is regarded as the new detail at level one, D1 new1. Then the Corr new1 and D3 will be multiplied directly, give a correlation2 Corr2 such as Eq. (10). Next the correlation is rescaled to the rst detail by Eq. (11):

Corr new2 = Corr2

PCorr new1 n 2 PCorr2

(11)

Corr2 = Corr new1 D3

(10)

Corr22 are where PCorr new1 = Corr new12 and PCorr2 = the powers of Corr new1 and Corr2 and n is iteration number. As the rst procedure, to compare the absolute value of Corr new1 and Corr new2, the values where Corr new1 more than Corr new2 are identied and stored in a new variable. This one is D1 new2. Finally, Corr new2 and D4 will be multiplied directly, giving a correlation Corr3 and rescaled Corr new3 as in Eqs. (12)

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and (13) as the same as above, and D1 new3 will be stored as usual: Corr3 = Corr new2 D4 Corr new3 = Corr3 PCorr new2 n 2 PCorr3 (12) (13)

If at this stage, more than two fault transients can be detected at D1 new3, then locate the fault using the absolute value of D1 new3 and stop the algorithm. If only one fault transient can be detected at D1 new3, then the algorithm will be repeated at the next iteration and nished when the signal detection is satised. The whole procedure can be described by the owchart in Fig. 5.

Fig. 6. Lattice diagram in case of near half fault.

Fig. 5. Flow chart of noise cancellation procedure for fault location.

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Fig. 7. Noise cancellation procedure at the 1 km fault (fault resistance: 0 , fault inception angle: 90 , n = 1): (a) D1 ; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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Fig. 8. Noise cancellation procedure at the 1 km fault (fault resistance: 0.5 , fault inception angle: 45 , n = 1): (a) D1 ; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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Fig. 9. Noise cancellation procedure at the 2 km fault (fault resistance: 0.5 , fault inception angle: 90 , n = 1): (a) D1; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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Fig. 10. Noise cancellation procedure at the 2 km fault (fault resistance: 0.5 , fault inception angle: 90 , n = 2): (a) D1; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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Fig. 11. Noise cancellation procedure at the 2 km fault (fault resistance: 1 , fault inception angle: 45 , n = 3): (a) D1; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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Fig. 12. Noise cancellation procedure at the 3 km fault (fault resistance: 0.5 , fault inception angle: 90 , n = 2): (a) D1; (b) D1 new1; (c) D1 new2; (d) abs(D1 new3).

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6. Simulation results In this section, the noise cancellation technique is applied for fault location on underground power cable system. In order to test this algorithm, the faults on the rst half, at 13 km from A S/S, are only to be considered. Fig. 6 shows the lattice diagram of the characteristic of traveling wave as the ground fault occurs on the rst half. In this case, after the arrival time of the rst and second reections at A S/S are successfully detected using noise cancellation technique, the distance(X) to fault point can be calculated by Eq. (14): X= c (TP 2 Tp2 ) 2 (14)

where c is the propagation velocity on underground power cable system, and Tp1 and Tp2 are the arrival times of rst and the second transients, respectively. Fig. 7 shows the noise cancellation procedure when the ground fault occurred at 1 km. In this case, fault resistance is 0 and fault inception angle is 90 . As shown in the gure, at the rst level detail (Fig. 7(a)), it is hard to discriminate the reected points because of the noises. However, after rescaling using multiple scales correlation, the noise is signicantly removed. As shown in D1 new2 (Fig. 7(c)) the reected point at A S/S can be easily detected. Finally, the distance to fault point can be calculated using the absolute value of D1 new3 (Fig. 7(d)). In this case, the rst and the second arrival times are 0.016667 and 0.016678 s, and the propagation velocity is 1.67487 105 km/s as discussed in Section 3. The calculated distance is 0.921 km which is very close to the exact fault distance of 1 km. In terms of fault at 1 km with fault resistance of 0.5 and fault inception angel of 45 , the noise cancellation procedure is shown in Fig. 8. Many noises in D1 are gradually removed from D1 new1 to D1 new3. From these results, the distance to fault point can be calculated using the absolute value of D1 new3. In Fig. 8(d), the rst and the second reection time are 0.014587
Table 2 Errors for fault location in different fault conditions Fault distance [km] Fault inception angle Fault resistance [ ] 0 Calculated distance [km] 1 0 45 60 90 0 45 60 90 0 45 60 90 0.921 1.005 1.005 0.921 2.093 2.093 2.009 2.009 3.182 3.098 3.098 3.098 n 1 1 1 1 3 2 1 1 3 3 3 3 Error [%] 1.257 0.079 0.079 1.257 1.479 1.479 0.143 0.143 2.896 1.559 1.559 1.559

and 0.014599 s. The calculated distance is 1.005 km which is also very close to the exact fault distance of 1 km. In case of fault at 2 km with fault resistance of 0.5 and fault inception angel of 90 , as shown in Fig. 9, the distance cannot be calculated because D1 new2 and D1 new3 have just one reection signal at the rst iteration (n = 1). In this case, algorithm will automatically go to the next step, n = 2. Fig. 10 shows the noise cancellation result at the second iteration (n = 2). In Fig. 10(d), the time of rst and second reections are easily detected at 0.016673 and 0.016697 s. Therefore, the calculated distance to fault point is 2.009 km. It is quite accurate. Figs. 11 and 12 show the noise cancellation results when the ground fault occurred at 2 and 3 km, respectively. In these two gures, the appropriate signals for fault location can be detected at the third iteration (n = 3) and the second iteration (n = 2), respectively. In Fig. 11(d), the arrival times of the two reections are 0.014593 and 0.014618 s. Therefore, the calculated distance to fault point is 2.093 km. The arrival times of reected signals in Fig. 12(d) are 0.016679 and 0.016715 s, and its distance is 3.014 km. The criterion used for evaluating the algorithm is the location error which is dened as: Error (%) = |actual location-calculated location| 100 total line length (15)

This algorithm has been tested for a variety of simulated fault conditions which include changing fault resistance from 0 to 1 , fault inception angle from 0 to 90 and fault location between 1 to 3 km. The maximum location error is less than 3% and the average error is 1.132%. The errors for fault location in all fault conditions are shown in Table 2. As shown in Figs. 712 and Table 2, it is possible to discriminate the reected signal from noises by the application of the algorithm proposed in this paper. This method is very useful in detecting the fault in noisy environment.

0.5 Calculated distance [km] 1.005 1.005 1.005 0.921 2.093 2.093 2.093 2.009 3.182 3.098 3.098 3.014 n 1 1 1 1 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 2 Error [%] 0.079 0.079 0.079 1.257 1.479 1.479 1.479 0.143 2.896 1.559 1.559 0.222

1 Calculated distance [km] 1.005 1.005 1.005 0.921 2.093 2.093 2.093 2.093 3.182 3.098 3.098 3.098 n 2 1 1 1 3 3 2 2 4 4 4 4 Error [%] 0.079 0.079 0.079 1.257 1.479 1.479 1.479 1.479 2.896 1.559 1.559 1.559

Average error [%]: 1.132.

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C.K. Jung et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 77 (2007) 13491362 [2] X.H. Wang, Y.H. Song, Sheath fault detection and classication based on wavelet analysis, Eur. Trans. Electric Power (ETEP) 16 (4) (2006) 327 344. [3] F.H. Magnago, A. Abur, Fault location using wavelets, IEEE Trans. Power Deliv. 13 (October (4)) (1998) 14751480. [4] E. Styvaktakis, M.H.J. Bollen, I.Y.H. Gu, A fault location technique using high frequency fault clearing transients, IEEE Power Eng. Rev. 19 (May (5)) (1999) 5060. [5] M.M. Tawk, M.M. Morcos, A novel approach for fault location on transmission lines, IEEE Power Eng. Rev. 18 (November (11)) (1998) 5860. [6] A.M. Gaouda, S.H. Kanoun, M.M.A. Salama, A.Y. Chikhani, Generation, wavelet-based signal processing for disturbance classication and measurement, IEE Proc. Transm. Distrib. 149 (May (3)) (2002) 310318. [7] I.K. Yu, Y.H. Song, Wavelet transform and neural network approach to developing adaptive single-pole auto-reclosing schemes for EHV transmission systems, IEEE Power Eng. Rev. 18 (November (11)) (1998) 6264. [8] F.N. Chowdhury, J.L. Aravena, A modular methodology for fast fault detection and classication in power systems, IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol. 6 (September (5)) (1998) 623634. [9] Z.Q. Bo, M.A. Redfern, G.C. Weller, Positional protection of transmission line using fault generated high frequency transient signal, IEEE Trans. Power Deliv. 15 (3) (2000) 888894. [10] X.H. Wang, R.S.H. Istepanian, Y.H. Song, Microarray image de-noising using stationary wavelet transform, in: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Conference on Information Technology Applications, 2003, pp. 1518. [11] H. Ye, G. Wang, S.X. Ding, A new fault detection approach based on parity relation and stationary wavelet transform, in: IEEE Proceeding of the American Control Conference, June 2003, pp. 29912996. [12] Stephane Mallat, Wen Liang Hwang, Singularity detection and processing with wavelet, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 38 (2) (1992) 617643. [13] Y. Xu, J.B. Weaver, D.M. Healy, J. Lu, Wavelet transform domain lters: a spatially selective noise ltration technique, IEEE Trans. Image Process. 3 (6) (1994) 747758.

7. Conclusions Fault location on underground power cable system is very difcult because the measurements include many noises. In this paper, in order to detect, classify the fault and discriminate the transients and the reected signal from noise, a new algorithm based on multiple scale correlation of wavelet transform was presented using current signal from one end. By this algorithm, faulty phase can be detected and classied by the approximation components of three phases on 4th level. Then the details at rst level are rescaled until the clear transients are identied. It proved that the noises can be signicantly removed by the proposed algorithm. The algorithm was validated by simulation on real power cable system. From these results, the faults can be detected and located even in very difcult situations, such as at inception angles of 0 and 90 . Acknowledgements This work has been supported by KESRI (R-2003-B-274), which is funded by Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE). References
[1] X.H. Wang, Y.H. Song, C. Ferguson, Wave propagation characteristics on crossbonded underground power transmission cables and sheath fault location, Eur. Trans. Electric Power (ETEP) 13 (2) (2003) 127131.