Abb Inc.

Ismail I Jouny

Steven A Kunsman

Joel A B Elston

Stephen Kaprielian

Thomas M LoCasale

An apparatus, system, and method for detecting high impedance faults in electrical power lines using a composite high impedance fault detection system having a voter logic that samples the logical outputs from a plurality of independent high impedance detection systems and determines a high impedance fault if any two of the plurality of independent high impedance detection systems indicates a high impedance fault. Preferably, the plurality of high impedance detection systems include a wavelet based high impedance fault detection system having a first logical output, a higher order statistics based high impedance fault detection system having a second logical output, and a neural net based high impedance fault detection system having a third logical output. Preferably, each of the plurality of high impedance fault detection systems includes an independent high impedance fault detection application that independently detects a high impedance fault on the electrical power line.

High impedance fault detection

Waveform information is transmitted from the ends of a protection zone by first compressing the information using a lossy compression technique such as wavelets and then compressing the lossy compressed waveform information using a loss-less compression technique such as the Burrows-Wheeler transform. Status information is transmitted from the ends of the protection zone by compressing that information using the loss-less technique. The time for transmission can be less than, equal to or greater than the time for one cycle of the power line frequency.

Growing community of inventors

Easton, PA, United States of America

Ismail I Jouny