Soft Computing Methods for Fault Detection in Power Transmission Lines

Communication is a major aspect of our day to day life and for maintaining the transmission of the data; electric power transmission lines play a major role in acting as the medium for this transmission. The transmission lines can further be differentiated as an overhead transmission line and underground transmission line. But the transmission is often hindered by the physical factors or generally known as faults. In the past few years, the implementation of the underground cable has seen an upsurge as these cables are not easily affected by the physical factors as the overhead cables are, as a result, there have been various methods adopted by the engineers for the analysis, detection and control of these faulty lines. Depending on the supply range of a particular nation different materials are used for the transmission lines. Different fault detection methods are used for the exact location of the fault and implementing that in a digitized way is the optimum solution. Whenever there is a fault the entire transmission line is affected, to ensure that the safety of the transmission line a governing system has been implied in our proposed work. Locating a fault requires various detection methods, one such method is the time domain reflectometry (TDR) which we have inculcated in our analysis of fault lines. This technique incorporates the transmission of a pulse down the cable, any change in the characteristics impedance will cause a part of the incident pulse to reflect back, this knowledge is helpful for locating discontinuities in a system.