Root-cause Analysis Method for Fault Diagnosis in Digital Substations of Power Systems

Speaker: Jiansheng Huang

Affiliation: University of Western Sydney

Time: Monday 22/10/2012 from 14:00 to 15:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Penrith (Y239), accessible from Parramatta (EB.1.32) and Campbelltown (26.1.50).

Abstract: Our literature survey shows that most substation diagnosis models take into account information of protective relays and circuit breakers, or fault features of a single device, i.e., only the local information to identify the faults. To monitor the operation in this way, however, current methods are inadequate to diagnose potential complex faults with uncertainties including multiple consecutive failures, malfunctions of protective relays and/or circuit breakers, missing or false alarms, and sensor errors. Our project is to address this challenge. A Cause-Effect fault diagnosis model is proposed, which utilises the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach and takes consideration the structure and technical features of a digital substation. The Dempster/Shafer evidence theory is employed to integrate different types of fault information in the diagnosis model so as to implement a hierarchical, systematic and comprehensive diagnosis based on the logic relationship between the parent and child nodes such as transformer/circuit-breaker/transmission-line, and between the root and child causes. A real fault scenario is investigated in the case study to demonstrate the developed approach in diagnosing malfunction of protective relays and/or circuit breakers, miss or false alarms, and other commonly encountered faults at a modern digital power substation.

Biography: Dr Jiansheng Huang's research activities have been carried out in a wide area of engineering, computer science and information systems, including power system protection, deregulated electricity markets, computational intelligence and information and database management systems. To date, Dr Huang has partaken in more than ten R&D and industrial projects and published over 70 journal and conference papers.