Proposal for Improving Fault Location in Electricity Distribution Networks through Topological Fractality

• Grant number: 25/11691-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Electrical Engineering - Power Systems
• Principal Investigator: Jonatas Boas Leite
• Grantee: Victor Augusto Parreira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia (FEIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Ilha Solteira. Ilha Solteira , SP, Brazil

Abstract

One of the persistent problems in overhead distribution network management is fault location (FL). The restoration time of an outage is directly correlated to the accuracy of the FL and the time required to diagnose the problem. The fault management process, therefore, must encompass fully automated FL, isolation of the faulted part, its repair and restoration of the power supply. The fault diagnosis tool, under development, establishes both the most probable location of a fault event and its cause, using the distribution network model and the fault data recorded by digital relays. Using the distribution network analysis model and nonlinear programming techniques, the FL algorithm is improved, becoming capable of pointing to the faulty bus and providing the fault resistance value with low computational cost. Since a higher fault resistance increases the search space, the number of candidate regions used by the algorithm must be adjusted, increasing the processing time slightly. In this scientific initiation project, it is proposed to use the topological fractality of the distribution network to determine the number and location of candidate buses to ensure the computational performance of the FL algorithm, since the topological fractality provides the correlation between the fractal dimension and the number of clusters in a distribution network, that is, the number of candidate regions of fault incidence. (AU)