IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO.

5, OCTOBER 1998 1265

A Novel Transmission-Line
Voltage Measuring Method
David W. P. Thomas, Member, IEEE, Richard Eric Batty, Christos Christopoulos, Member, IEEE, and Anding Wang

Abstract— A novel transmission-line monitoring method for

estimating the transient voltage from the transient current alone
is presented. This is based on the properties of traveling waves
instigated on high-voltage transmission lines as a result of a fault,
switching operation, or a lightning strike. The method is unique
in that superimposed voltage transients can be deduced without
employing measurements taken from voltage transducers. It is
demonstrated that full advantage can be made of the broad
bandwidth of the current transducers to improve fault location
and enable high-speed traveling wave protection to be applied on
power systems. Fig. 1. Incident and reflected voltage waves at a load.
Index Terms— Impedance measurement, power systems,
transmission-line protection, traveling waves. be predefined, however, as this depends on the local loads
and connected transmission lines which will be constantly
I. INTRODUCTION changing on an active power system. A technique is therefore
required for initially estimating the busbar impedance so that

M OST protection, measurement, and control schemes

employ two transducers on each phase to measure
voltage and current. The voltage transducers are usually the ca-
pacitor voltage transformer type, which is essentially a circuit
tuned to the power frequency with a very poor bandwidth. The
application of modern techniques for power system protection
and control have been limited by the poor bandwidth available
from the voltage transformers. The benefits of this scheme
are that it will provide a backup for the conventional voltage
transducers and also improve the bandwidth of the measured
transient voltages enabling high-speed traveling wave-type
protection to be employed on power systems. The principle is,
however, general enough to find application in other areas of
electrical engineering which involve significant transmission-
line propagation such as microwave engineering.
II. PRINCIPLE OF THE METHOD
If the busbar impedance to ground and the current
to ground at the busbar are known, then the voltage at the
busbar will be given by
(1)
In principle then, it is possible to estimate the busbar voltage
from the measured busbar current to ground and the known
busbar impedance. The busbar impedance to ground cannot
Manuscript received May 18, 1998; revised November 30, 1998. This work
was supported in part by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council.
D. W. P. Thomas, R. E. Batty, and C. Christopoulos are with the Electrical
and Electronic Engineering Department, The University of Nottingham,
Nottingham NG7 2RD, U.K.
A. Wang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Xian Jiatong
Universiy, Xian, Shaanxi, 710049 China.
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9456(98)09802-7.
0018–9456/98$10.00  1998 IEEE
(1) can be used.
The method proposed is based on the properties of traveling
waves on transmission lines. The traveling wave voltage
amplitude on a transmission line is related to the traveling
wave current amplitude and the line surge impedance only.
For a single phase line the traveling wave voltage is given
by [1]
(2)
where is the line surge impedance, is the traveling wave
current, and the sign depends on the direction of propagation
of the transient with respect to the direction of positive current.
In general, however, the transmission-line voltages and
currents will be the result of many propagating waves and
so the total superimposed voltage will not be as given by (2).
For a traveling wave incident at a busbar, as shown in Fig. 1,
the resulting total voltage at the busbar will be the sum of
the incident and reflected wave voltage amplitudes and ,
respectively, which gives
(3)
The transmission line current at the busbar will be the sum
of the incident and reflected currents and , respectively,
giving
(4)
Thus, in general the ratio on a transmission line is not
equal to the line surge impedance. However, if we consider a
general busbar with many connected transmission lines, then if
a transient is instigated on line 1 (possibly due to a fault), the
initial transient traveling waves at the busbar will be as shown

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1266 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998

modal current are given by

(6)
(7)

where and are the matrix vectors of the phase

voltages, respectively, and and are the modal voltage
Fig. 2. The direction of propagation of the incident, reflected, and transmit- and current transformation matrices, respectively. For a three-
ted voltage waves at a busbar due to a fault on line 1. phase system and are 3 3 matrices giving three
modes of propagation, two aerial modes propagating at close
in Fig. 2. Fig. 2 shows that initially there will be two transient to the velocity of light, and one ground or common mode
traveling waves on line 1, due to the incident and reflected which usually propagates at a much reduced velocity [1].
waves, and only one transient traveling wave on all the other With suitable choice of and it can then be shown [1]
lines due to transmission of the transient onto these lines. that the modal voltages and currents propagate as independent
The transient voltage (an incremental voltage superimposed modes and they have the relationship
on the power system voltage) can then be estimated from (2)
(8)
using the line currents on all the transmission lines except
the one where the transient originated. Provided there are where the sign depends on the direction of propagation of
at least three connecting transmission lines, the correct line the transients with respect to the defined positive current and
voltage can then be identified. This in itself could be used is the modal surge impedance matrix which is a diagonal
as a directional protection scheme as the faulted line can be matrix.
immediately identified as the line current on the faulted line Then each modal current must also satisfy Kirchoff’s current
which will be different from that on the healthy lines, and this law given by (5) which gives
protection principle is described in publication [2].
Clearly, after a short time all the transmission lines will (9)
contain more than one transient traveling wave, due to reflec-
tions from remote terminations. Nevertheless, there is a short
window in which the busbar voltage and current to ground For a three-phase power transmission system it is the modal
is known and the busbar transient impedance can be found. voltages which are estimated for each line at the busbar using
With this estimated impedance it should be possible to derive (8), and then the busbar modal impedance is estimated using
the busbar voltage from (1) for a period (typically one power the busbar current found from (9).
cycle) that will enable protection and control equipment based On power systems it is common to make the approximation
on superimposed quantities to be employed. that the three phases are fully balanced and the transmission
The total busbar current to ground (due to loads or sources) lines are fully transposed so that all mutual inductances and
can either be measured directly using a current transformer capacitances are the same. For this case the voltage and current
(CT) or it can be found from the transmission line currents transformation matrices are identical , and in this
and applying Kirchhoff’s current law work we have used

(5) (10)

The proposed scheme is then as follows.

1) First estimate the busbar voltage and current to ground
using (2) and (5).
2) From the estimated voltage and current, estimate the
busbar impedance to ground.
3) Once the busbar impedance is established, continue to
obtain estimates of the busbar voltage using (1).
If there is not a significant local load at the busbar, then
a remote load on a healthy short transmission line may be
used provided there is another longer healthy line from which
the busbar voltage can be found. This will be described more
fully in a later publication.
On multiconductor transmission lines the traveling-wave
transients propagate as independent modes [1] where each
modal voltage is related to its modal current through the
modal surge impedance. The transients are first transformed
into modal quantities [1] where the modal voltage and
III. LOAD PARAMETER ESTIMATION
Over the short duration considered in this study it is believed
that the modal impedance of a load can be characterized to
a reasonable approximation by a resistance and inductance
in series. The estimation of the modal resistance and
inductance can take several forms and each was investigated
for accuracy, speed, and computational efficiency. The basic
equation is
(11)
where and are the known voltages and currents, respec-
tively.
Equation (11) can be solved directly using numerical meth-
ods for estimating the derivative However, numerical
differentiation tends to enhance noise and reduces the accuracy

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THOMAS et al.: TRANSMISSION-LINE VOLTAGE MEASURING
Fig. 3. System simulated of a phase-to-ground fault 50 km from the busbar
on line 4 (all distances in kilometers).
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. (a) Mode 1 and (b) mode 2 incremental voltages compared with the
modal currents on each of the transmission lines at the busbar (I2 = line 2,
I3 = line 3 and I4 = line 4) multiplied by the line modal surge impedance Z.
of the estimates. Another form involves numerical integration
over a time interval to
(12)
Numerical integration tends to average out noise, but care
has to be taken to optimize the integration interval so that
only a reasonable data set is used.
The data can also be transformed in to the frequency domain
so that the following expression is solved for and :
(13)
where and are the Fourier transforms of the
time domain voltage and current transients and , to a healthy line of at least 150 km in length. The differential
respectively, with being the frequency. The advantage
of the frequency domain is that numerical integration or
differentiation are not required and efficient Fourier transforms
exist in the form of the fast Fourier transform. This method
may, however, require an excessively large data set.
The method of least squares can be employed to improve
the estimation accuracy over a certain window length. For the
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1267
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. (a) The resistance estimate and (b) inductance estimate of the local
impedance using the fault transient given in Fig. 4.
original formulation given in (11) this then has the form
(14)
where
(15)
and
(16)
All these methods were investigated over a range of system
conditions and load types. It was found that the integral form
given in (12) gave the most reliable results, requiring about
a millisecond, at a 25 kHz sample rate, of voltage data (25
samples). This voltage data can be provided by applying (2)
form of (11) also gave reasonable results but was a little
too susceptible to noise. The frequency domain method given
in (13) proved the least useful as the transients tend to be
dominated by the power frequency (50 Hz), particularly when
a fault at voltage zero has occurred. The data required for
accurate Fourier transforms was then of the order of 20 ms
which would not be practical.
1268 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998
Fig. 6. Estimated and actual mode 1 voltage.
IV. RESULTS
Since the principle aim of the project is to provide a method
for estimating transient voltages on power systems, the work
was carried out on simulated power system transient data using
the EMTP package [3]. Several ehv power system configura-
tions were studied and a variety of transient conditions were
also considered. The example system used is shown in Fig. 3
where the busbar studied is attached to three transmission
lines and the local impedance has a short circuit capacity of
35 GVA (inductance 0.0147H, resistance for
aerial modes). The three-phase transients were decomposed
into modal transients to simplify the calculations and the
ground or common mode was ignored as its propagation
velocity and surge impedance is vary variable. A sampling
rate of 25 kHz was considered as it was felt that this was a
practical value and also meant that the EMTP was simulating
transients within its range of validity (less than 100 kHz).
The frequency range considered should also be well below
the cutoff frequency of linetraps [4].
The immediate objective was to be able to reproduce the
transient voltage over about one power cycle to an accuracy
of about 5% (this was thought to be equivalent to the normal
noise in the power system voltage). The utility of the voltage
estimate was demonstrated by incorporating it into a traveling
wave protection scheme where it was shown to perform
extremely well.
A. Initial Estimation of the Voltage
As described in Section II, the initial estimate of the voltage
is made by applying (8) to the superimposed currents sampled
on all the connecting transmission lines at the busbar. This
approach has been validated on many transmission line con-
figurations. The equation is a straightforward scaling of the
modal currents and is therefore limited only by the current
measurements. Typical results are shown in Fig. 4 which
shows the modes 1 and 2 voltage estimates on each of the
transmission lines given in Fig. 3 compared with the actual
busbar voltage. Note that after a period, equal to the round
trip propagation time of the transmission line, the estimated
voltages deviate from the true busbar voltage (this is at 2.16 ms
for line 2 and 2.83 ms for line 3). Thus the limitation is that
as soon as there is a reflected wave from the remote end of the
healthy lines then the line current will not be proportional to
the line surge impedance and the estimation will cease to give
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the correct voltage. For lines of length 40–50 km this means
that only about 0.3 ms of data is available.
B. Load Parameter Estimates
The estimate of the load impedance has been tried on many
load types and for many variations of the main methods
described in Section III. It has been found that the integral
method as given by (12) and an integral period of 0.8 ms
(20 time steps) give rapid and accurate results, and these are
presented here. Fig. 5 shows the inductance and resistance
estimates of a local load using (12) over the initial 2 ms of
the transient event. The integral period used was 0.8 ms and
the voltage estimate is reliable for 2 ms for this example, so
that after about 1.2 ms the inductance and resistance estimates
become unreliable. It follows that a rapid and accurate estimate
can be made of the local impedance using a data window
of 1 ms. The loads are likely to be an impedance attached
via a step-down transformer. However, it has been found that
the transformer load combination can be represented by a
equivalent series inductance and resistance so that only these
equivalent values need to be estimated to give reliable results.
C. Voltage Estimate Using the Load Impedance
Once the load impedance has been estimated, the busbar
voltage is then simply given by (11) by using the measured
busbar current to ground found from (9). Fig. 6 shows the
actual mode 1 voltage compared with the estimated mode 1
voltage. Fig. 7 shows the error between the estimated voltage
mode 1 transients compared with the actual voltage transients
for the example in Fig. 6. Similar results are found for the
mode 2 transients. It can be seen that the incremental voltages
are now reproduced accurately over a period of a full power
cycle which should be sufficient for ultra-high-speed power
system protection.
D. Remote Loads
If there is no local load at the relay busbar then there
will not be a current to ground with which to estimate the
transient voltages. For this situation the nearest remote load
that is connected by a healthy line may be used. A second
longer healthy line has to be used to provide the voltage data
for the remote impedance estimate. It should then be possible
to estimate the voltage and current at the remote load and
from this the remote load impedance. Once the remote load
impedance is known then the busbar voltage will be given by
the line current in the transmission line connecting the busbar
to the remote load and the impedance of the combination of
the remote load and connecting transmission line.
E. Application to a Traveling Wave Protection Scheme
To demonstrate the utility of the estimated voltage, this and
the measured current were applied to a traveling wave scheme.
The traveling wave scheme chosen was that proposed by
Crossley and McLaren [5] as it is one of the more demanding
schemes. It was found that this voltage estimation scheme
preforms very well with the traveling wave protection which
THOMAS et al.: TRANSMISSION-LINE VOLTAGE MEASURING 1269

Fig. 7. The percentage error in the estimated voltage given in Fig. 5.

Fig. 8. The S1 and S2 parameters for the transients given in Fig. 4.

Fig. 9. The cross-correlation function of signal S1 with S2 as shown in
Fig. 8.
then responded correctly to the faults. Results are shown for
the transients given in the previous figures. round-trip transient propagation time between the busbar and
Fig. 8 shows the relaying quantities and which are the fault.
defined as [5] The transients were caused by a fault 50 km from the relay
location on line 4. Fig. 9 shows the deduced cross-correlation
(17)
function as used in the Crossley and McLaren scheme. The
(18) first peak in the cross-correlation at 4 10 s indicates the
location of the fault and this gives a clear indication of a fault
where represents the transients incident at the busbar and
location 59 km from the relay which is within the expected
represents the transients propagating away from the busbar.
error margin (12 km).
An amplitude greater than indicates that there is a
forward fault and is the basis of many traveling wave schemes
[6], [7]. In the Crossley and McLaren scheme a sample of V. CONCLUSIONS
the reflected signal is also cross-correlated with the signal A technique for estimating the voltage transients has been
The peak in the cross-correlation function indicates the developed that can provide about one cycle of transient voltage

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1270 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 47, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1998
with a bandwidth of a few kilohertz using just the information
available from the transient current. The scheme is thought to
be ideal for traveling wave relaying schemes which in the past
have not found wide application due to the poor bandwidth of
capacitor-voltage transformers. Results presented demonstrate
its utility for the traveling wave protection scheme as proposed
by Crossley and McLaren.
This scheme uses the fact that initially the line transient
current is related to the transient voltage by the line surge
impedance. An estimate of the busbar impedance can then be
found from the initial transients, which is then used to estimate
the transient voltage over a period of about one power cycle.
The power system must, however, contain at least two lines of
150-km length. This is not expected to be a severe restriction
as the scheme is intended for application in traveling wave
relaying schemes which are applied to the longer lines.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank the University of Nottingham
for the facilities made available during the preparation of this
paper.
REFERENCES
[1] D. E. Hedmen, “Propagation on overhead transmission lines, Part
1—Theory of modal analysis,” IEEE Trans. Power Aparatus Syst., vol.
84, p. 489, 1965.
[2] E. R. Batty, D. W. P. Thomas, and C. Christopoulos, “A novel unit
protection scheme based on superimposed currents” in Proc. 6th Int.
Conf. Developments in Power System Protection, no. 434, pp. 83–86.
[3] W. Scott-Meyer, EMTP Rule Book. Portland, OR: Bonneville Power
Admin.
[4] R. K. Aggrawal, A. T. Johns, and Z. Q. Bo, “Non-unit protection tech-
nique for EHV transmission systems based on fault-generated noise,”
Proc. Inst. Elec. Eng. Gener. Transm. Distrib., vol. 141, no. 2, pp.
133–140, Mar. 1994.
[5] P. A. Crossley and P. G. McLaren, “Distance protection based on
traveling waves,” IEEE Trans. Power Aparatus Syst., vol. PAS-102, pp.
2271–2982, Sept. 1983.
[6] A. T. Johns and E. P. Walker, “Co-operative research into the engineer-
ing and design of a new digital directional comparison scheme,” Proc.
Inst. Elec. Eng., vol. 135, pp. 2971–2982, 1983.
[7] C. Christopoulos, D. W. P. Thomas, and A. Wright, “Scheme based on
traveling-waves for the protection of major transmission lines,” Proc.
Inst. Elec. Eng., vol. 135, pt. C, pp. 63–73, 1988.
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David W. P. Thomas (M’95) was born in Padstow, U.K., on May 5, 1959. He
received the B.Sc. degree in physics from the Imperial College of Science and
Technology, the M.Phil. degree in space physics from Sheffield University,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Nottingham University,
in 1981, 1987, and 1990, respectively.
In 1990 he joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
at the University of Nottingham as a Lecturer. His research interests include
electromagnetic compatibility, electrostatic precipitation, and the protection
and simulation of power networks.
Richard Eric Batty was born in Scunthorp, U.K.,
on June 21, 1970. He received the M.Eng. degree
in electrical engineering at the University on New-
castle upon Tyne in 1993.
In 1993 he joined the School of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering of the University of Notting-
ham and spent three years as a Research Assistant
studying novel traveling wave protection schemes.
In 1997 he joined BICC Cables Supertension and
Subsea Cables Ltd., U.K., where he is now an
Engineer.
Christos Christopoulos (M’94) was born in Patras, Greece, in 1946. He
received a diploma in electrical and mechanical engineering from the National
Technical University of Athens in 1969 and the M.Sc. and D.Phil. degrees
from the University of Sussex in 1970 and 1975, respectively.
In 1974, he joined the Arc Research Project at the University of Liverpool
and spent two years working on vacuum arcs and breakdown while on
attachment to the UKAEA Culham Laboratories. In 1976 he joined the
University of Durham as a Senior Demonstrator in Electrical Engineering
Science. In 1978 he joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
where he is now a Professor of Electrical Engineering. His research interests
include electrical discharges and plasmas, electromagnetic compatibility,
electromagnetics, and the protection and simulation of power networks.
Anding Wang was born in China on November 4, 1958. He received the
B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong
University in 1982, 1984, and 1988, respectively.
He joined Xi’an Jiaotong University as a Teaching Assistant in 1984, where
he is now an Associate Professor. His research interests include the protection
and simulation of power networks.