Transmission Line Fault Detection using Prony Method: A Case Study of Nigerian 330kV Network

International audience The power systems of many developing countries like Nigeria are always characterized by poor generation, overloading, and less smart controls. Consequently, many fault occurrences lead to a total shutdown of the system. Accurate detection of faults, which improves the relay's decision making, increases the system reliability. This paper presents an accurate fault detection technique based on Prony method. The Prony method is used to decompose fault signals into damped sinusoids; and based on the frequency and the amplitude of the resulting sinusoids; a fault occurrence decision is made. The proposed method is applied to a section of Nigerian 330kV, network modeled in Simulink/MATLAB software and all types of line faults were accurately detected. The results show that the proposed method accurately differentiates faults from load switching transients.