DELIVERY AND APPLICATION OF PRECISE TIMING FOR A TRAVELING WAVE POWERLINE FAULT LOCATOR SYSTEM

Michael A. Street

Abstract:	The Bonneville Power Administration has successfully operated an in-house developed powerline fault locator system since 1986. The BPA fault locator system consists of remotes installed at cardinal power transmission line system nodes and a central master which polls the remotes for traveling wave time-of arrival data. A power line fault produces a fast rise-time traveling wave which emanates from the fault point and propagates throughout the power grid. The remotes time-tag the traveling wave leading edge as it passes through the power system cardinal substation nodes. A synchronizing pulse transmitted via the BPA analog microwave system on a wideband channel synchronizes the time-tugging counters in the remote units to a differential accuracy of better than one microsecond. The remote units correct the raw time tags for synchronizing pulse propagation delay and return these corrected values to the fault locator master. The master then calculates the power system disturbance source using the collected time tags. The system design objective is a fault location accuracy of 300 meters. This paper describes BPA's fault locator system operation, error producing phenomena and method of distributing precise timing.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 22th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting December 4 - 6, 1990 Sheraton Premiere Hotel Vienna, Virginia
Pages:	355 - 360
Cite this article:	Street, Michael A., "DELIVERY AND APPLICATION OF PRECISE TIMING FOR A TRAVELING WAVE POWERLINE FAULT LOCATOR SYSTEM," Proceedings of the 22th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting, Vienna, Virginia, December 1990, pp. 355-360.
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