Transmission line individual phase impedance and related pilot protection

Abstract This paper proposes a kind of new Individual Phase Impedance (IPI) and a novel pilot protection scheme for transmission line based on the IPI. The IPI is calculated by the ratio of the voltage difference of fault-superimposed component to the current difference of fault-superimposed component at both terminals of the protected line. The IPI has accurate mathematical expressions and reasonable physical definitions for various line models. The calculated result of IPI can be used to distinguish the internal faults from the external faults. When the IPI is identical to the value of line positive-sequence impedance, the external fault is detected; otherwise, the internal fault is detected if it differs from that value. The feature of the pilot protection scheme is that the inter-phase coupling relation and the distributed capacitance based on the three-phase line model are directly considered and included in the IPI expression. The novel pilot protection can be used for long distance HV transmission lines with some preeminent performances which are deficiency in the conventional directional comparison pilot protection and current differential protection. The test results obtained by EMTP simulation and from a laboratory model of a simplified real power system have demonstrated that the pilot protection is of high reliability and good adaptability.