1830 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO.

4, OCTOBER 2006

Ground Distance Relay Compensation

Based on Fault Resistance Calculation
M. M. Eissa, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—The fault resistance introduces an error in the fault

distance estimate, and hence may create an unreliable operation
of a distance relay. A new compensation method based on fault
resistance calculation is presented. The fault resistance calculation
is based on monitoring the active power at the relay point. The
compensated fault impedance measures accurately the impedance
between the relay location and the fault point. The relay has
shown satisfactory performances under various fault conditions
especially for the ground faults with high fault resistance. This
new compensation method avoids the under-reach problem in
ground distance relays.
Index Terms—Active power, distance protection, fault resistance,
impedance measurement.

I. INTRODUCTION

ROTECTION of an important transmission line is most

P frequently performed using phase-and ground distance
relaying techniques. Distance relays effectively measures the
Fig. 1. Under reach of the distance relays.

impedance between the relay location and the fault. If the

resistance of the fault is low, the impedance is proportional A distance relay is set to operate up to a particular value of
to the distance from the relay to the fault. A distance relay is impedance; for impedance greater than this set value the relay
designed to only operate for faults occurring between the relay should not operate. This impedance, or the corresponding dis-
location and the selected reach point and remain stable for all tance is known as the reach of the relay.
faults outside this region or zone [1]. A distance relay may under-reach because of the introduction
In developing distance relay equations, the fault under consid- of fault resistance as illustrated in Fig. 1. Relay at O is set for
eration is assumed to be an ideal (i.e., zero resistance) [2]–[8]. protection up to Z. If a fault at Z occurs such that fault resistance
In reality, the fault resistance will be between two high-voltage R is high and by adding this resistance the impedance seen by
conductors, whereas for ground faults, the fault path may con- the relay OZ’ such that Z’ lies outside the operating region of
sist of an electrical arc between the high-voltage conductor and the relay, then the relay does not operate. Fig. 1 shows the trip-
a grounded object. The fault resistance introduces an error in the ping polygonally characteristic in case of high fault resistance.
fault distance estimate and, hence, may create unreliable opera- Some techniques [12]–[17] are suggested for enhancing the high
tion of a distance relay [9]. fault resistance problem. These techniques accommodate this
The impedance seen by the relay is not proportional to the problem by shaping the trip zone of the distance relay to ensure
distance between the relay and the fault in general, because of the apparent impedance is included inside the trip zone.
presence of resistance at the fault location. In this paper, a new fault impedance compensation method
Some techniques for arcing faults detection and fault distance based on fault resistance calculation is given. The fault resis-
estimation are introduced in [10] and [11]. The techniques are tance is calculated using the active power at the sending end.
based on the voltage and current at one terminal in the time do- The relay uses a Fourier filter to derive the voltage and current
main. The overhead line parameters and arc voltage amplitude phasors. The problem of under reach in ground distance relays
during the fault are given. The techniques have optimal applica- is solved. The ground distance relay with this new compensated
tion in the medium voltage networks and symmetrical faults. method will be demonstrated. The results will show that the fault
impedance with high fault resistance is accurately zoned.
Manuscript received May 25, 2005; revised October 30, 2005. Paper no.
TPWRD-00309-2005. II. DOUBLE-END-FED EARTH FAULTS
The author is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty Fig. 2 shows the phase current lags the phase current
of Engineering, Helwan University, Helwan, Cairo 11421, Egypt (e-mail:
mmmeissa@yahoo.com). by the angle because of the transfer of power from to .
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2006.874621 Since the fault resistance can normally be neglected in the case
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
EISSA: GROUND DISTANCE RELAY COMPENSATIONBASED ON FAULT RESISTANCE CALCULATION 1831

(2)

where has been substituted for the sum and

has been substituted for the sum .
The impedance to the fault is given as

Fig. 2. Relationship between the phase voltages and phase currents.

(3)

So the uncompensated fault impedance is

(4)

is a source of error in distance relays,

so the actual fault impedance is

Fig. 3. Diagram for illustrating the flow of sequence power quantities. (5)

In the same manner and for a three-line-to-ground fault

and symmetrical component circuit, the uncompensated fault
impedance for the distance relays is

(6)

is a source of error in distance relays, so

the actual fault impedance is

(7)

This paper aims to introduce compensated fault impedance

for (5) and (7) based on fault resistance calculation from the
active power and current measurements.

III. FAULT RESISTANCE CALCULATION

Fig. 4. Symmetrical component circuit for a line-to-ground fault (A 0G fault). The voltages at the fault point can be expressed by

(8)
of phase-to-phase faults, it is sufficient to consider it only in the (9)
case of earth faults particularly since the tower-to-earth resis-
tance, which under difficult ground conditions and the absence (10)
of a continuous earth wire, can reach significant values. (11)
Consider a single unbalanced fault from line-to-neutral on
a system supplied through a grounded generator with pos- where
itive-, negative-, and zero-sequence impedances of ,
and , respectively, and with a generated positive sequence (12)
line-to-neutral voltages of and , respectively. Assume (13)
that this system is supplying a fault resistance on phase
whose impedance is as illustrated in Figs. 3 and 4. The total phase quantities at the point of fault are readily ob-
For a fault between phase A and ground, the symmetrical tained from the above sequence quantities with the following
component connection diagram is shown in Fig. 4. The phase results:
voltage and current can be expressed in terms of the symmet-
rical components, and the voltage of phase at the fault point (14)
can be set as
(15)
(1)
1832 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2006

The sequence power quantities per phase at the fault are Also, the contribution current from the receiving end to the
fault is a factor from the contribution current to the fault from
the sending end
(16)
(24)
(17)
(18) Hence, (21) can be described as

The total power quantities may be obtained by combining the (25)

sequence quantities as
The total power in the fault is described as

(26)
Also, from the single-phase solution, the total power quanti-
ties equal From (25) and (26), the real part of the fault resistance is given
as

(27)

where is defined as the instantaneous power measured at the

(19)
sending end and is determined as [19] and [20].
According to the above explanation, the compensated fault
From (19), it can be concluded that the total power in the fault
impedances for (5) and (7) are described, respectively, as
resistance equals the power in phase “ ” ( and );
(Fig. 3).
So

(20) (28)
and
where and are the power in the fault resistance from the
two sources for phase . So (20) can be expressed as (29)

(21) Equations (28) and (29) are the compensated fault impedance
calculation for the single and three earth faults, respectively.
With minimal load flow at the time of the fault [18] and the
electromotive-force (emf) constant at the sending and receiving
ends ( and ), the current contribution at the receiving IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
end is almost in phase with the current at the sending end. The power system used for testing the proposed new method
Thus, the phase relationship between the fault currents ( is a part of a 500-kV power system shown in Fig. 5. The system
and ) and the voltages ( and ) can be described by includes two generating stations. A distance relay is located at
( ) and ( ). buses and as shown in Fig. 5. The voltage and current sig-
From the above explanation, it can be concluded that the re- nals are the inputs to the relays, and 300 km is the line length.
lation between the total power at the receiving end is The results described on the R-X diagram (transient impedance
directly proportional with a factor of the total power at the trajectory). The relay is set to protect 90% of the line. It forms
sending end . So the first zone of the relay, corresponding to a maximum reach
of about 0.486 p.u., and has an arcing reverse of about 150%
(22) [21]–[23]. The arcing reverse is the resistive allowance of the
trip area as a ratio of the inductive reactance. The reach of the
where is defined as the distribution factor of the generated second zone is set at 120% of line-1. The power system is mod-
power at the receiving end with respect to the generated power eled and different symmetrical and unsymmetrical faults with
at the sending end. solid and fault resistance are simulated using the Electromag-
Consequently, the contribution power to the fault from the netic Transients Program (EMTP).
receiving end is also a factor of the contribution power to the The voltage and current signals are measured at the relay lo-
fault from the receiving end. So cations using a sampling frequency of 5000 Hz. The results ob-
tained from the tests are given here. The uncompensated and
(23) compensated fault impedances given in (4) and (28) have been
EISSA: GROUND DISTANCE RELAY COMPENSATIONBASED ON FAULT RESISTANCE CALCULATION 1833

Fig. 5. Single-line diagram of the 500-kV power transmission system.

Fig. 8. Fault impedance trajectory for C 0 G fault with a solid fault at 150 km
from relay-S (F 2).

Fig. 6. Fault impedance trajectory for C 0 G fault with fault resistance =

200 at 50 km from relay-S (F 1).

Fig. 9. Fault impedance trajectory for B 0G fault with fault resistance =

200 at 320 km from relay-S (external fault at F 3).

and fault resistance. Results showed faults are taken with a fault
resistance ranging from 0 to 300 .
The value of compensated and uncompensated fault imped-
ances seen by the phase to ground relay element is depicted
in Figs. 6–9. It is observed that if the compensated fault
Fig. 7. Fault impedance trajectory for C 0 G fault with fault resistance = impedance is used, the relay of fault is located exactly in its
100 at 150 km from relay-S (F 2). proper zone. Whereas, if the uncompensated impedance is used
the fault impedance is misoperated and located out of its zone
or inaccurately located in its zone.
described as the single-phase earth faults while the uncompen- Figs. 10 and 11 show the fault trajectory for the 3L-G fault
sated and compensated fault impedances given in (6) and (29), (internal and external) protected zone. As seen in the figures, the
respectively, have been described as the three-phase earth faults. compensated fault impedance is properly identified as the zone
The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated for of fault and, thus, avoids misoperation in case of 3L-G faults
different types of internal and external faults, source impedance, through high fault resistances.
1834 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 21, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2006

fault impedance compensation based on fault resistance calcu-

lation. The problem of under reach in ground distance relays is
solved. The investigation showed that the fault resistance detec-
tion could reach 300 . The results showed that the relay oper-
ates correctly for faults simulated within the first, second, and
third zones. The suggested technique gives the solutions for the
symmetrical and unsymmetrical faults. Fault impedance is ac-
curately calculated; this will improve the relay selectivity. The
techniques can be used for medium and long lines.
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M. M. Eissa (M’96–SM’01) was born in Helwan, Cairo, Egypt, on May 17,

1963. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from
Helwan University, Cairo, in 1986 and 1992, respectively, and the Ph.D. de-
gree from the Research Institute for Measurements and Computing Techniques.
Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest, Hungary, in 1997.
Currently, he is an Associate Professor with Helwan University. In 1999, he
was invited to be a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Calgary, Cal-
gary, AB, Canada. His research interests include digital relaying, application of
wide-area networking to power systems, and wavelet applications in power sys-
tems.
Dr. Eissa received the Egyptian State Encouragement Prize in Advanced Sci-
ence in 2002 and the best research in the advanced engineering science from
Helwan University in 2005.