An improved fault location method for distribution networks exploiting emerging LV smart meters

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. In the last years, the electrical distribution systems are undergoing one of their largest transitions in their long history towards smart grids. One of the key requirements and the first step in the path of smart grid is developing and deploying smart metering systems in distribution networks. In this regard, several projects co-funded by the European Commission (EC) have been carried out. FLEXMETER is one of the ongoing EU Horizon 2020 projects aiming at the development and demonstration of a flexible smart metering architecture. In this paper, first the different available measurements in the FLEXMETER project are introduced. Then different fault location methods are compared qualitatively and quantitatively to find the most appropriate one based on the FLEXMETER infrastructure. Finally a combined method as a hybrid solution is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the previously proposed ones, while keeping their advantages.