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4, OCTOBER 2007
Abstract—This paper presents a comparative study of the per- The location of the shunt-FACTS device depends on the ap-
formance of distance relays for transmission lines compensated plication for which it is installed. Shunt compensation FACTS
by shunt connected flexible ac transmission system (FACTS) con- devices are installed at the end points of transmission lines
trollers/devices. The objective of this study is to evaluate the perfor-
mance of various distance protection schemes on transmission lines (buses) when used for applications, such as bus voltage regula-
with shunt-FACTS devices applied for midpoint voltage control. tion and improving HVDC link performance, etc. However, for
The impact of two types of shunt FACTS devices, static var com- increasing the power transfer capability of long transmission
pensator (SVC) and static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) lines (tie lines connecting two major grids) midpoint of the lines
on the transmission line distance protection schemes is studied for is the best location for shunt connected FACTS devices [1].
different fault types, fault locations and system conditions. The
power system elements and the shunt-FACTS devices with their For this reason, the application of shunt-FACTS for midpoint
associated controllers are modeled using RSCAD/RTDS software. compensation of transmission lines is considered in this paper.
The results are based on the performance of commercial distance Distance protection relays have been widely applied for pro-
relays using a real time digital simulator (RTDS). tecting transmission lines due to their simple operating principle
Index Terms—Distance channel aided schemes, distance protec- and capability to work independently under most circumstances
tion relay, flexible ac transmission system (FACTS), power system [5]. Therefore, it is important to study how these distance relays
protection, real time digital simulator, shunt compensation, static would perform when protecting a transmission line compen-
synchronous compensator (STATCOM), static var compensator
sated with FACTS controllers. The effect of series compensation
(SVC).
including series FACTS controllers on the performance of dis-
tance protection relays has been extensively studied [6]–[9]. On
I. INTRODUCTION the other hand, only few papers have studied the effect of shunt-
FACTS compensation devices like STATCOM [10], [11] for
HE use of flexible ac transmission system (FACTS) midpoint voltage control application in which only a software
T controllers in power system transmission has been of
worldwide interest in recent years for increasing the power
model of a single relay for stand-alone distance protection is
considered. Although the voltage controllers and the STATCOM
transfer capability and enhancing power system controllability are reasonably modeled in [11], the paper has not elaborated
and stability [1]–[3]. However, the implementation of FACTS on the effect of the FACTS Controller - characteristics, their
controllers in transmission systems introduces new power control systems (such as the effect of the balanced firing) and
system issues in the field of power system protection, in partic- transients behavior during fault on the relay performance. This
ular the line protection that must be considered and analyzed, paper has also not studied the impact of shunt-FACTS on the
such as, rapid changes in line impedance, power angle, load performance of distance protection schemes. It is very impor-
currents, and the transients introduced by the fault occurrence tant to consider the reaction of the FACTS Controller to the fault
and the associated control action [4]. Furthermore, the response when studying the effect on the distance relay performance as
time of FACTS controllers is fast and might overlap with the the shunt FACTS controllers (SVC and STATCOM) have fast
response time. This paper considers elaborate models of the
protective device operating time. Therefore, the performance
of a protection system should be carefully analyzed in the FACTS controllers along with their control systems.
presence of FACTS controllers. The present work is a continuation to an ongoing research
in this area, part of which was published in [12] and [13]. In
[12], the impact of midpoint shunt-FACTS compensated line on
Manuscript received August 8, 2006; revised October 10, 2006. Paper no.
TPWRD-00457-2006.
the performance of only a stand-alone single distance relay is
F. A. Albasri is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, studied using EMTDC/PSCAD. In addition, some results for
at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada, on leave the performance of a single commercial relay at one bus ter-
from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of
Bahrain, Bahrain.
minal are presented for only SVC compensated system. In [13],
T. S. Sidhu and R. K. Varma are with the Department of Electrical and Com- the performance of only one channel-aided scheme was studied
puter Engineering, at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, with no consideration for the communication channel delay. In
Canada. both [12], [13], the effect of the fault resistance was ignored. The
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. objective of this paper is to present the issues that could affect
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2007.900283 the performance of stand-alone and five channel-aided schemes
0885-8977/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
ALBASRI et al.: PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DISTANCE PROTECTION SCHEMES 2117
TABLE I TABLE II
COMMERCIAL RELAY PERFORMANCE WITH NONPILOT COMMERCIAL RELAY PERFORMANCE WITH NONPILOT SCHEME FOR 3-PHASE
SCHEME FOR DIFFERENT FAULT LOCATIONS EXTERNAL FAULT IN A STATCOM COMPENSATED WEAK SYSTEM
TABLE III
EFFECT OF FAULT RESISTANCE ON THE COMMERCIAL RELAYS PERFORMANCE
FOR LINE-GROUND FAULTS AT 60% OF LINE 1
Fig. 5. Relay operation and the midpoint voltage for the BC fault at 105% in C. Effect of Fault Resistance
an SVC-compensated weak system operating at a 40 prefault load angle.
The performance of the commercial relays is also tested for
fault conditions involving fault resistance for shunt-FACTS
compensated strong and weak systems. The fault resistance is
varied from 0 to 50 ohms and a line-to-ground fault is applied
at 60% from relay 1 location (i.e., within zone 1 reach of the
two end relays) and for 20 prefault load angle (LA) in forward
and reverse power flow directions. The performance of the
commercial relays is shown in Table III.
Fig. 6. Case of delayed tripping of zone 1 for a BC fault at 65% in a STATCOM When the shunt-FACTS is not installed as indicated by the
compensated weak system for a prefault load angle of 40 .
row with FACTS device “OFF”, the relays at the two ends of
the compensated line tripped on zone 1 for range of fault re-
are also observed. An example is a case of LL fault with weak sistance from 0 to 50 ohm. However, when the shunt-FACTS
system loaded at 20 degree and compensated with STATCOM device is connected in the circuit, the operation of the com-
wherein the relay 1 took 424 ms to trip on zone 2 which is more mercial relays at the two ends gets affected due to the in-feed
than 5 cycles of delay compared to the setting of zone 2 time current of shunt-FACTS in the fault resistance. This results in
(20 cycles). In this case, zone 2 of relay 1 picked up first for 54 larger apparent impedance seen by the relay at both the ends
ms and then dropped off for 11 ms and then picked up again for of the compensated line. Hence, the shunt-FACTS current in-
396 ms during which Zone 2 time elapsed and relay 1 tripped jection results in under-reaching wherein both relay either fail
on zone 2. In some other case, a delay of more than 9 cycles was to operate or tripped on zone 2 in some cases as the fault re-
also observed in the tripping of zone 2. sistance increased. It can be seen that relay 2 tripped on zone
4) Phase Selection: There were several cases of incorrect 2 as indicated by the highlighted cells in Table III. This will
phase selection indicated by the commercial relay compared affect the relay operations for channel-aided schemes incorpo-
to the applied fault type. The relay gave incorrect phase selec- rating the under-reaching zone for keying such as PUTT and
tion for some cases for which the shunt-FACTS Controller is DUTT scheme. It is also noted that the impact on relay 2 is less
present in the fault loop and during high prefault loading con- because the impedance error is only due to the fault resistance
dition with unsymmetrical faults. However, no case of incorrect given by the second term of (7). This result supports the anal-
phase selection was observed for relay 2, which is located at ysis given in Section III on the effect of fault resistance with the
the remote end. Most of incorrect phase selection was observed presence of shunt-FACTS.
for unsymmetrical faults. This may be attributed to the balanced
three-phase firing technique employed in the voltage controllers VI. PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF
THE PILOT PROTECTION SCHEMES
of the shunt FACTS devices in which control system acts on
a dc voltage equivalent to the measured three-phase voltage. The commercial relays are connected by a communica-
Thus for unsymmetrical faults, in which faulty phases experi- tion link and set to operate under five channel-aided schemes
ence a severe undervoltage compared to the healthy phases, the namely: the direct under-reach transfer trip (DUTT), permissive
FACTS device would provide equal compensation for all the under-reach transfer trip (PUTT), the permissive over-reach
three phases. This means that healthy phase(s) voltages can in- transfer trip (POTT), directional comparison blocking (DCB),
crease due to this equal compensation. As a result, the overcom- and the directional comparison unblocking (DCUB) schemes.
pensation of the healthy phases can result in an increased reac- In practice, the time delay introduced by the communication
tive current in healthy phases. This would increase the possi- channel varies depending on the type of the channel. As a re-
bility of incorrect phase selection for unsymmetrical faults, par- sult, the performance of the five channel-aided schemes is tested
ticularly if the relay installed uses current based phase selection. for 0, 0.5 and 1 cycles of communication channel delay. More
No case of relay phase selection was observed for light prefault than 3600 test cases were performed to test the performance
load of 20 . of the channel-aided schemes, considering three type of faults
2122 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 22, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2007
TABLE IV TABLE VI
RELAY 1 OPERATION FOR INTERNAL FAULTS AT 20 (FORWARD) RELAY 1 OPERATION FOR EXTERNAL FAULTS
TABLE VII
SUMMARY OF THE NUMBER OF NO RELAY OPERATIONS OF RELAY
1 FOR INTERNAL FAULTS BEYOND THE SHUNT-FACTS DEVICE
TABLE V
RELAY 1 OPERATION FOR INTERNAL FAULTS AT 40 (REVERSE)
and DCUB. However, this was not sufficient to clear faults at D. Influence of Shunt-FACTS Device Type
the end of the line in which relay 1 also failed to operate.
It is noted that the under-reach effect due to SVC is less as
compared to that with the STATCOM. As a result, there are
B. Influence of External Faults more cases of no relay operation for system with STATCOM
compensated system compared to that with the SVC compen-
Table VI shows the results for external faults for both 0.5 and sated system. The over-reaching effect, which is observed for
1 cycle channel delays. All the schemes showed similar per- STATCOM compensated weak system, caused overtripping for
formance for external faults. However, the main concern is the external faults. As expected, this led to incorrect relay opera-
over-reach effect of the STATCOM, which causes relay 1 to trip tion regardless of the schemes used. Under such condition, ad-
on zone 1 for 3-phase fault at the adjacent line taking about 40 ditional security measures should be considered or zone 1 ele-
ms to trip as shown in Table VI for the 40 loading. This leads ment should be either restrained or time delayed with additional
to maloperation of relay 1 regardless of the protection scheme cross check signals. The over-reaching was also noted for in-
used. Relay 2 did not operate because the fault occurred behind ternal 3-phase faults at the end of the line. An example of this
its forward zones. case is the tripping of relay 1 on Zone 1 for 3-phase fault at
The under-reach effect of the shunt-FACTS device also influ- 95% for STATCOM compensated weak system under 1 cycle
enced the backup distance protection (Zone 2). It is noted from channel delay, whereas it tripped on channel-aided scheme for
Table VI that for fault at 100% of line 1, relay 1 did not trip SVC compensated system as shown in Table VI.
for all types of faults in case of STATCOM compensated strong
system whereas it did not trip for LG faults in case of SVC com- E. Influence of Relay Location
pensated system. Similarly, for the weak system condition, relay The results show that relay performance is affected only
1 did not operate for faults within zone 2 reach (for fault at 105% whenever the shunt-FACTS devices fall in the faulted loop.
of line 1) for all types of fault in case of STATCOM compen- As a result, relay 1 on the local end (station A) is impacted by
sated line whereas it did not operate for both LG and 3-phase the shunt-FACTS for faults located beyond the shunt-FACTS
fault in case of SVC compensation as shown in Table VI. For device (beyond the 50% of the compensated line). Whereas for
faults beyond 108% of line 1, relay 1 did not operate regardless similar faults, relay 2 operated correctly as the shunt-FACTS
of the fault type, prefault load, and the shunt-FACTS device. device does not fall within its fault loop at a condition of zero
fault resistance. Hence, the performance of relays under the
DUTT scheme superseded the performance of other schemes.
C. Influence of Fault Type
F. Influence of Channel Delay
It is observed that relay 1 did not operate for most of the LG
faults indicating severe under-reaching effect compared to the It is mentioned earlier that there are several cases in which
other fault types. This causes no pickup of the over-reaching el- the Zone 2 picks up for short time during the transient period
ement Zone 2 and hence results in the failure of protective relay of the impedance trajectory. In DCB scheme, the instantaneous
to clear the faulted line for all the schemes except the DUTT Zone 2 at a local terminal is delayed by a settable communica-
scheme, which does not require a local qualifying signal upon tion channel coordination time delay to allow time for a possible
the receipt of a transfer trip signal from the remote end relay. remote blocking signal to get transmitted to the local terminal.
For the line-to-line (LL) faults, the five protection schemes This settable time delay could affect the relay performance in
clear the faulted line successfully for all the tested cases for SVC case such short pickup of Zone 2 element occurs. So, if the
compensated system. Whereas for similar fault in a STATCOM pickup time of Zone 2 is less than this setting, the relay will
compensated system, several cases of no relay operations are not operate under the DCB scheme whereas it would operate on
observed at fault locations 75% and beyond for weak system other schemes, which do not require such setting. This can be il-
and from 85% for the strong system as shown in Tables IV and lustrated in Fig. 7 in which Zone 2 of Relay 1 (R1:Z2) pickup for
V. These conditions of relay failure to trip for internal LL faults short time in DCUB scheme which initiated a channel-assisted
are observed for all the schemes except the DUTT. tripping of relay 1 whereas it did not trip for DCB scheme due
Although not shown in the results of Tables IV–VII, very few to the settable communication channel delay time of the DCB
cases of no relay operations are noted for the three-phase in- scheme, which is set to 1.25 cycles in this case. In addition, the
ternal faults. There are six such fail operations which occurred carrier coordination time of the DCB scheme results in a longer
only in a STATCOM compensated strong system protected with fault clearing time compared to the other schemes.
the DCB scheme and with channel delay of 0.5 and 1 cycles. The short time pickup of Zone 2 element due to the
These cases are shown in Table VII, which give the summary of shunt-FACTS devices can also impact the operation of the other
all cases of no relay operation for the internal faults. These cases schemes when communication delay is increased. Fig. 8 illus-
occurred for 3-phase faults at the end of the line (99%) when the trates a condition in which relay 1 operated on channel assisted
channel coordination time delay is set at 1.25 cycle. When the tripping in POTT scheme when there is no communication
communication coordination time is reduced from 1.25 cycles delay, whereas, it did not operate for similar condition when
to 0.75 cycles, the relay cleared the fault by channel-assisted the channel delay increased to 0.5 and 1 cycle. It is noted from
tripping. This shows the impact of the communication coordi- Fig. 8 that the difference between the pickup of zone of Relay
nation time setting of the relay in DCB scheme. 1 (R1:Z2) and the assert of the received permissive trip signal
2124 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 22, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2007
I. Overall Performance
The performance of the five schemes in terms of the number
of cases at which each scheme failed to clear the internal
solid fault is summarized in Table VII. It summaries all cases
including those shown in Tables IV–V. It gives the summary of
no trip cases encountered during different operating condition;
namely, two prefault loading conditions (20 and 40 ), two
power directions, two systems (weak and strong), three channel
delay conditions (0, 0.5 and 1 cycles) and five different fault
locations (from 65% to 99%).
As can be seen from Table VII, the majority of cases of no
relay operation occurred during the LG faults followed by LL
faults. The only cases of relay failure to operate for 3-phase in-
ternal fault were observed in the DCB scheme as a result of the
communication coordination time delay setting of its instanta-
neous Zone 2 element.
The performance of the DUTT schemes is the best among the
schemes as it does not require a qualifying signal locally and
Fig. 7. AG fault at 75% of a STATCOM compensated strong system operating just depends on the tripping of the remote relay which is less af-
at power angle 20 (reverse) and with half cycle channel delay. (a) DCUB Scheme
(R1 tripped on channel assisted). (b) DCB scheme (R1 did not trip). fected by the shunt-FACTS device for fault beyond the FACTS
location. The DCB scheme is most affected by the shunt-FACTS
compared to the other schemes, as it requires a delay of the in-
stantaneous Zone 2 element, which is not required by the other
schemes. The PUTT, POTT and DCUB schemes have almost
the same number of unsuccessful fault clearing conditions be-
cause they use the overreaching Zone 2 element for qualifying
the received permissive signal. However, the performance of the
PUTT scheme is most affected by the fault resistance compared
to the other schemes as it uses the under-reaching Zone 1 for
keying. Similarly, the DUTT scheme will be affected by the
fault resistance as it also uses Zone 1 for transfer trips to the
other relay. The STATCOM caused larger under-reach, which is
manifested as higher number of no relay operations for internal
faults in the STATCOM case as compared to the SVC case.
VII. DISCUSSION
Fig. 8. Digital signals for AG fault at 65%, STATCOM compensated weak
system, 20 (forward), POTT scheme with no channel delay. Although this paper considers the influence of midpoint lo-
cated shunt-FACTS devices, it is expected that installing shunt-
FACTS at the end of the line would reduce the severity of the im-
(R:PT) is 5 ms. As a result, the relay did not operate when the pact on distance relays in particular for channel-aided schemes
channel delay is set to 0.5 cycle (8 ms). for internal faults. This is because the shunt-FACTS device will
not be included in the faulted loop for internal faults and the cur-
G. Influence of Transient Response of the Shunt-FACTS rent of the shunt-FACTS device can be easily compensated at
The presence of shunt-FACTS in the fault loop of a distance the relay location where the FACTS device is connected. How-
relay also influences the relay response. The transient response ever, for STATCOM compensated lines, care should be given
of the shunt-FACTS is the main factor in delaying the relay re- for the possible overreach as this could lead to relay overtrip-
sponse. As expected, the DUTT offered the shortest tripping ping for external faults. The impact will be more on the Zone 2
time compared to the other schemes as it does not require any and Zone 3 reach of the distance relays.
ALBASRI et al.: PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DISTANCE PROTECTION SCHEMES 2125