Cross-Country Faults in Resonant-Earthed Networks

Sammanfattning: Reliability requirements for power systems have been constantly increasing, as customers of electric power desire high power availability. In order to improve continuity of supply in medium voltage (MV) networks, utilities in many countries in Europe, North/South America and Oceania use resonant earthing and allow the operation of the network during a single phasetoearth fault for periods from several seconds up to several hours, since the earthfault current at the fault point in such systems is considerably reduced and is unlikely to damage equipment or create hazardous voltages for people or livestock. Due to the neutral potential displacement during the phasetoearth fault, the healthy phases can rise up to 1.73 times the nominal values in the entire network, overstressing insulation and increasing the probability of a second fault from another phasetoearth fault somewhere in the network. The situation of two simultaneously active phasetoearth faults on different phases at different locations in a network is commonly called a crosscountry or doubleearth fault. The current through the earth then becomes many times higher than in case of a single phasetoearth fault in a resonantearthed network. Few studies about CrossCountry faults in MV systems have been done so far, particularly with real fault data and simulations. This thesis has as main objectives to: improve understanding of how crosscountry faults behave in resonantearthed systems; show how the double fault situation can be analytically calculated; and study what difficulties these faults can pose to traditional distance protection. This is done by: analyzing recordings of real faults, obtained from utilities in Scandinavia; modelling the fault situations analytically; simulating such systems with real system data; and examining in particular how faultedphase selection and distance protection behave during these faults. The developed mathematical model was compared with a simple simulated system. The results showed that the modelling produces accurate results. Analysis of the real faults showed that crosscountry faults cannot be equated directly to more traditional singlephase or doublephase faults on particular feeders, since voltages and currents can behave in atypical manners. Finally, during the comprehensive simulations of such network, limitations of traditional distance protection were identified. Phasetophase loops can face difficulties in properly detecting crosscountry faults even when one of the two simultaneous faults is relatively close to the measuring point. Phasetoearth loops can only be reliable when faults are solid or with very low resistance and in conditions where zero sequence current is present, while for multiple infeeds can also face difficulties.