Recently, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been lucratively applied to different problems of power system optimization. The accurate fault location problems which utilize the distributed parameter line model have complicated functions with inequality constraints that make the problem of finding the global optimum difficult utilizing any mathematical method. In this paper, fault location method based on the PSO is presented. In this method, asynchronous voltage and current data on both sides of transmission line is utilized, and the location of fault and the time required for data synchronization are calculated simultaneously by solving an optimization function, using the PSO algorithm. This method is executed based on the distributed parameter model of transmission line which fully considers the capacitance effect of the line. In addition, this algorithm is not dependent on the type of fault, the fault incidence angle, and the Thevenin equivalent impedances of both sides of the line. The proposed method has been evaluated using a variety of faults in various conditions and different fault incidence angles on the simulated network in MATLAB/Simulink. The results showed the high accuracy of the proposed method.

Keywords: Distributed parameter line model, Fault location, Non-synchronous voltage and current, Particle swarm optimization algorithm